Cranes on flat country. A Taiwanese chip giant is building Europe’s biggest semiconductor factory north of Dresden. The “building blocks of modern economy” play a central role against China, the USA, the rest of the world … Yet it is precisely in this place, where the new is grandly heralded, that a “forgotten future” lies buried. This was the centre of GDR semiconductor research, which strove to realise a social utopia by means of microelectronics. Some see the chip as a “weapon” in the fight for economic dominance and profit, others saw it as a political programme on the path to the “new human”. Jonas Meschede mixes neon-coloured images of a futuristic setting from the cleanrooms of the present with GDR science fiction and archive footage, unearthing what was buried. Once more, the promises of a golden future appear at the end. And the certainty that in the ground on which its gleaming factories are built what was declared dead only lies dormant.

Grit Lemke

Encouraged by the UN Resolution of 6 November 1974, which condemned the human rights violations of the Chilean military dictatorship, relatives of imprisoned and disappeared persons first began to join forces. Whether in this or other initiatives fighting for a return of democracy to Chile, the resistance was always primarily driven by women. It became more and more visible in the 1980s, not least due to the creativity of their forms of action. One example: On 30 October 1985, the “Mujeres por la vida” organised a protest in the Providencia district of Santiago under the slogan “Somos+” (We are more). The women formed three rows moving towards each other, each holding a ribbon in one of Chile’s national colours. The video documentation of the protest and its violent breakup by the police won multiple awards at the 1986 West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen.

Florian Wüst

Luscious avocado plantations. Smoke rising on the horizon. Then echoes of explosions. In the “Envelope”, just before the border with Gaza, Yo, Tom, Yan, Piak and Lee work in Israeli fields. Like many other migrant workers, they were recruited from Thailand. They work for below-market wages, often seven days a week, up to 17 hours a day, to support their distant families. They are being observed by a robot snake that crawls through the fields looking for Hamas tunnels beneath the farmland. Bullet casings among the weeds, makeshift shelters in front of the barracks – a psychogeography of fear and vulnerability. Sometimes, in brief moments of leisure, the light-hearted games and the community of young men provide a distraction. On 7 October 2023, the underworld opens up and interrupts the film, which then shifts to the families of the victims. On the banks of the Mekong, the mythical snake god Naga guards the threshold between the living and the dead. An intangible, floating and empathic narrative about precarious labour movements through a military-agrarian complex.

Jan Künemund