The Wall as a symbol. While the deadly border has already been overcome in Berlin, freedom must still be fought for in other states. A piece of the Wall was sent to Riga in 1990 – as a gesture of solidarity. A short cinematic essay in which people’s looks waver between hope and uncertainty.

A Nazi propaganda film that survived only in fragments and never got to “test” its effect. It took intensive research to identify the scattered remains, correct the title in circulation, “Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt” (The Führer Gives a City to the Jews), and clarify who was able to see the roughly 90-minute attempted defraud at all before it disappeared. The intended international audience was no longer within reach in 1944/1945. But would they have been convinced by the retirement home for “resettled” Jews staged here? Kurt Gerron, film and theatre celebrity, interned in the Ghetto and conscripted as co-director, was deported to Auschwitz and gassed as late as 1944.

Poznań, June 1956: For a long time, the “forgotten uprising” in which dozens of people lost their lives was a taboo in Poland. It was only in the mid-1980s, in a period of liberalisation, that Marek Drążewski could make this astonishingly frank review, in which he condenses the dramatic events using private photos, footage and memories of contemporary witnesses.

A look back on Hungarian history ends in the bloody present of October 1956: The suppression of the uprising in Budapest, filmed from the point of view of those affected. The material was smuggled abroad and assembled there by refugee filmmakers. A direct contemporary document which at the end reflects the powerlessness of the West: Nobody came to help.

“Bells ring for victim and perpetrator alike, they ring for the master and the servant, the sounds falling into each other, beginning and end, life and death, sleep and awakening, work and prayer.” Helga Schütz’s lyrical verses are closely interwoven with Dagnija Osite-Krüger’s exploration of bells and their many shapes. Whether melted down as tools of war or warning of danger – “Vivos Voco”, which also teaches us about the craft of bell founding, envelops us in an eery, monumental and epochal way. In her auto-fictional biography, Schütz writes about the collaboration with Osite-Krüger: “The two of us and the film, we were a team, we and the co-determinant images.”

A Soviet figure skater, a female Yugoslav sex partisan, a Vietnam veteran, Father Stalin and the Austro-American orgasm researcher Wilhelm Reich rumble in the belly of this film. Some people believe that Dušan Makavejev invented subversion in the first place. He exploited the gaps of freedom in the Yugoslav brand of socialism and developed an exceptional cinematic model which irritated both the dos and don’ts of the medium as well as those of political unambiguousness. The Western world was amused by this collage of feature, documentary and sexual education that transgressed all boundaries of ideology and modesty, but the tolerance of the Yugoslav censorship authorities was overstrained – at least temporarily. The 1971 screening ban was lifted in 1986. In 1988, Makavejev returned to Yugoslavia from the West.

Rolling into the village: Circus Hein. Angelika Andrees is interested in the individual acts presented in the ring, but even more in what happens before and afterwards. Or what the audience look like from below, when various bottoms are squashed on the wooden benches. Sometimes there’s clacking and knocking, or the pattering of rain, and in the end, Bob Dylan sings. “Travelling Circus” was made when Andrees was still at the Babelsberg Film Academy. She experiments with different elements, switches tones and thus captures the moods crystallising around the travelling attraction. A portrait emerges, without commentary and with very few, short interview sequences.

Ten years after the bloody suppression of the workers’ uprisings, the dead are commemorated in front of the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980. The memorial service conceived by Andrzej Wajda could only be documented after sustained pressure. The resulting montage, which links images of the event with emotional reports by contemporary witnesses, was never supposed to be.

“Everyone says fat people eat too much. But it’s not that simple”, Christiane Hein states at the beginning of her film which follows seven-year-old Robert Becher from Erfurt in his struggle against excess pounds. The stages include a dieting sanatorium complete with “juice day”, humiliating physical education lessons at school and a visit to relatives in the country where Robert experiences a life without teasing and self-punishment. This is where the boy lets go – not easy when thoughts of weight fence one’s life in. Again and again, director Hein inserts scales as a symbolic image reminiscent of a guillotine-like torture instrument. A compassionate portrait.

A handful of quarrymen in the Reinhardtsdorf open cast mine near Bad Schandau dig out the coveted Elbe natural stone. Gabriele Denecke’s approach to the men, who are of different ages, is almost trance-like, the movement to and from the stones marks the transition to another world. We hear about the merciless working conditions of the past, about alcohol, people worn out before their time. Today, digging out the massive rocks in the midst of nature also constitutes a degree of freedom. Open cast miners share a special mindset. And: Once you’ve worn out your first pair of wooden shoes, you’ll stay – probably forever.

Coal briquets hit the waggon with a thundering sound, are loaded, unloaded and finally end up in the houses of Prenzlauer Berg. Renate Uhle is the owner of a coal shop run by her family since 1922. Together with her men – Klaus, Kalle, Manne, Erwin, Pummel, Felix and Würstchen – she sees to it that no one in the neighbourhood freezes. Work is hard, the afterwork beer obligatory, and Renate’s tongue quick and sensitive. Helke Misselwitz follows the workers on their chugging diesel-driven ants through the streets and the watershed year of 1989, sweats with them as they climb up endless stairs and listens to them through the cigarette smoke.

Shots of ordinary life from seven months in Tallinn, where nothing is ordinary in 1988. In the course of perestroika, the people’s national awareness grows stronger and the return to Estonian identity is celebrated by the masses. Soviet occupation must end. Observations from a country in upheaval, commented on with tender irony.