How much black humour does it take to defy the horror? “The Masturbator – The Adventures of Edgar Hilsenrath” delves into the radical world of the writer and Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath – one of the first who dared to face the trauma with grotesque wit and unrestrained laughter. In a mixture of animation and historical archive material, the film follows Hilsenrath’s alter ego from his novel “Fuck America”: a penniless, sex-obsessed writer in 1950s New York who is desperately trying to publish his memories of the ghetto under the title “The Masturbator”. Writing becomes an obsession, a provocation and an act of survival. Born in Leipzig in 1926, Hilsenrath’s path took him through Nazi Germany, Bukovina and a Transnistrian ghetto via Palestine and France to America and back to Europe. A journey through places of loss, hope and disappointment. A journey through a century in which the ghosts of fascism keep returning. Burlesque animations collide with raw, real-life images. This friction gives rise to the portrait of an artist whose books are international successes but who fell into obscurity in Germany. “The Masturbator” combines biography, memory and the present to create a film that is as unsettling as it is liberating, about the power of satire and the necessity to speak out against forgetting.

Ola Staszel

An institutional portrait in the form of an elegy: after more than sixty years, the fate of the Les Lilas maternity clinic already seems sealed. Having not worked in a profitable enough manner, this private institution is now to have the subsidies it relies on withdrawn. Alain Kassanda’s film accompanies the clinic’s last flicker of resistance, showing heated internal meetings and the public protests aimed at saving it. The interactions between the purple-uniformed staff and their patients come to the fore at the same time: offering caring guidance across the entire birth process, precisely explaining the specifics of an imminent abortion or advising a young couple confronted with an unplanned pregnancy. Everyday life in the Maternité des Lilas is both eventful and moving. And it can look back on a long tradition: deeply anchored in the second wave of the women’s movement, the clinic made history for its progressive approach. Everyone was supposed be able to give birth in the way they saw fit, the patriarchy was banished from the delivery room and operating theatre – “mon corps, mon choix”. This inconspicuous place retained this forward-looking approach to the last. Alain Kassanda’s lament is far from maudlin. It is the unsentimental depiction of a loss only justifiable on paper.

Carolin Weidner

The miracle of birth in close-up. Třeštíková’s first observational documentary marks the starting point of a long-term study that is to last 37 years and culminate in the film “Private Universe”. Her distinctive style is already evident in this intimate miniature – the portrait of a young woman preparing for motherhood emerges in just a few scenes. Třeštíková won the 1975 Golden Dove in Leipzig for “The Miracle”.

Lina Dinkla