“Le sang a caillé, les bouches se sont tues,” Jean Cayrol writes. Paul Celan translates: “The blood has congealed, the mouths have fallen silent.” Alain Resnais’ archive film about the National Socialist concentration camps set new standards for the essayistic form. The score by Hanns Eisler had nothing to fear from changes to another language version. But the words of Jean Cayrol, more elegy than commentary? Paul Celan, creator of the “Death Fugue” and already associated with Cayrol as his translator, was asked to translate it into German. His lyrical rhythm, his tense switches deviating from the original text have shaped the West German reception history of Resnais’ film.

“Le sang a caillé, les bouches se sont tues,” Jean Cayrol writes. Henryk Keisch translates: “The blood has dried, the mouths have fallen silent.” When Resnais’ film was to be licensed for theatrical release in the GDR, it seemed obvious to resort to the West German dubbed version. But Celan’s translation failed to meet the approval of DEFA. They found fault with elisions that, for example, omitted the deportees from the Soviet Union. The official correspondence ended on an apodictic note: The acquisition was considered “irresponsible”. The writer and translator Henryk Keisch, loyal to the party line, was commissioned to write a new version – and of course made up for Celan’s omissions.

Designed as a travelogue about Israel, Herbert Viktor emphasizes similarities to the FRG of the economic miracle years in his film: clean, neat, busy, enterprising. Haifa, for example, is described as having evolved from a “meeting place for Arabic caravans and robber bands” to the most modern port of the Levant. Viktor also pays tribute to the welcoming culture for the persecuted of the world, but omits to elucidate on the fates that lie behind them. The film, spiced up by staged intermezzi to become a statement of sympathy, was released in Federal German cinemas in 1959 under the patronage of Willy Brandt. It was not allowed on Israeli screens before 1962, when the death sentence against Adolf Eichmann had been upheld by the court of appeal.

The beaches of Havana, splashing around, tender gestures between lovers, the sun glistening on the water, hips swaying to music. With this light-handed etude, Néstor Almendros delivers a shimmering testimony of post-revolutionary relaxation – and an early proof of his virtuosity as a cinematographer.
The film was made at ICAIC – and disappeared there, too. The national film art institute founded in 1959 by order of the new government saw no place for such neorealistic extravaganzas in the new Cuban cinema and issued a screening ban. Néstor Almendros left Cuba in 1961 to become a world-renowned cinematographer in the US and Europe. His name was expunged from the ICAIC filmography published in the book accompanying the 1974 Cuban retrospective in Leipzig.

Petra looks back on an eventful day: Together with other kids she went on a paperchase, solved a few small tasks and coordinated with her assigned partner. There were some adventures, but also a classroom situation set up in a meadow where one’s knowledge of the local flora was tested. In the end, they all boarded sailing boats and glided off into an atmospheric evening. A protocol in letters, accurately drawn up at the Potsdam Pioneer House, serves as the framework for one of the first completed films of the newly founded German Academy of Film Art in Babelsberg.

It is said of Krzysztof Kieślowski that he did not see himself as a political filmmaker. At least this early documentary casts doubt on this, for it depicts the cold stranglehold of bureaucracy. The setting is a municipal funeral home in Warsaw. Phone calls are made, documents checked and stamped. Business runs like clockwork, from the cradle to the grave.
Leipzig naturally maintained ties with older Polish documentarists like Jerzy Bossak, even after he relocated to Denmark. The fact that Kieślowski and other notable Polish film artists of his generation did not appear in the programmes before 1990 fits into the image of a life consumed by pettiness painted here. The real issue was probably animosities with the festival in Cracow.

The GDR formed an image of its citizens, hardy in everyday life and firm in principles, that it wished to see reflected in “their” art. Dresden-based artist Volker, called Via Lewandowsky, avoided the vanity of the GDR art scene and reflected something else back to his superior state: the indolence of the flesh, the gluttony of the systems that allegedly ordered the world. This Super 8 film from the late German Democratic subculture rubs against Heiner Müller’s stage text “Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome A Shakespeare Commentary”. The manuscript was (half) published in 1986 by the East Berlin Henschelverlag with the following proviso: “If the play is not accepted for production, this book must be returned immediately […].” Lewandowsky emigrated to West Berlin in 1989 before the fall of the Wall.

On a train to Rostov-on-Don in 1980, Malian-Mauritanian bursary holder Abderrahmane Sissako met the Angolan Afonso Baribanga, who had also been sent to the USSR. Both are supposed to learn Russian. Sissako studied film directing at the WGIK in Moscow, while Baribanga pursued a different career and eventually returned to Angola, where a post-colonial civil war was raging. Years later, Sissako sets off in search of his vanished friend, travelling to his own and Baribanga’s African homelands, where the old and new world powers have left devastating traces. In 1997, in a side section, DOK Leipzig presented the feature-length version of Sissako’s travelogue, which is steeped in contemporary and colonial history. The 2024 Retrospective presents an abridged version.

A wall stands in a barren, inhospitable landscape, insurmountable. While the birds are flying unhindered through the air, a human being struggles in vain to open a door in the wall. First as a small child, then as an adult, finally as an old man. When the door at last unexpectedly gives way, it seems too late. A dark allegory by the Leipzig-based painter and graphic artist Rainer Schade.

Prague in July 1968. The West German television magazine Panorama reports on the situation in the ČSSR, drawing parallels to the developments in Budapest in 1956. Curious and sceptical at the same time, the feature explores the possibilities of an independent reform movement, but also soberly concludes that the Soviet Union will not tolerate this. The tanks are already waiting at the border.

History in a hurry: Namibia becomes independent in March 1990, in July the Publicly Owned Enterprise DEFA becomes a GmbH, in October GDR becomes FRG East, in August a West and an East German filmmaker record one of the last GDR inconsistencies for DEFA. The state in pre-retirement sends 425 Namibian children, whom it had rescued from Angolan camps eleven years earlier, “home.” Hastily. But why? When Grote, Kunert and the children arrive, a Namibian minister explains that the East German supporters of these colonial war victims are now out of power. The new powers had no interest … In the Leipzig festival selection in 1990, and again in 1991, this film about German-Namibian foreignness and alienation cannot be found. The Retrospective 2024 makes up for this strange omission.

On 23 August 1989, the people in the Baltic states demonstrated their solidarity against the Soviet occupation and took to the streets for their sovereignty. They formed an over 600-kilometres-long human chain stretching through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Touching images of a one-of-a-kind event, captured in a lyrical composition.

The Latvian director’s graduation film from Moscow Film School does not deliver images loyal to the regime but is a testimony to her journalistic background. When the independence struggle is to be suppressed by military power, the people in Riga erect barricades. Laila Pakalniņa captured the dramatic events whose topicality is frightening.

This still controversial ethnofiction is one of Jean Rouch’s most famous films. It stages followers of the Hauka cult in Ghana incorporating their colonial masters to marching music imported from Europe. The disturbing work was released at the same time as the first Leipzig festival year, but would have gone beyond the scope of the “Culture and Documentary Film Week”. This was because the festival did not adopt an international focus until 1960. Nevertheless, Rouch floats through Leipzig’s festival history as an inspiring genius: He is regarded as the founder of Cinéma-Vérité, a documentary concept that was pursued with great interest in Leipzig, and he irritated the colonial gaze by encouraging African filmmakers to determine the images of their continent themselves.

“No freedom without dwarves!” What form of oppositional logic can take hold when nothing is logical anymore? “The Orange Alternative” has answers. When living conditions in communism reach the threshold of the surreal, the protest movement that sprang from student circles decides to subvert the order of the regime by Dadaist artistic interventions.

When Hollywood star Errol Flynn appeared on the Leipzig festival screen in 1960, he had been dead for a year. The audience saw him in his last role: as an aged lover – of Havana, casinos and cocktails, as the nemesis of the Cuban liberation movement, which had declared war on corrupt bon vivants like him. The movie swashbuckler rhapsodises about his Cuban counterpart Fidel Castro and nonchalantly moderates the history of the dictatorship and liberation of the island state, cigarette holder in hand.
Did Hollywood call Leipzig to recommend this film? It was probably Moscow, because its world premiere is said to have taken place there in 1959. But how did the self-confessed anti-communist Errol Flynn come to make this declaration of love? Maybe his new friend Fidel did not tell him the whole truth?