Szymon and Franek live near the river Oder, where Poland and Germany meet. They spend everyspare moment with their friends at the skate park, a place where everyone meets, no matter where they come from. This short documentary, shot on 16mm, follows two children growing up in a border region who wonder what borders actually are: Something tangible, like the river they look at, or something that exists only in their minds?

Lina Dinkla

“A polemical short film lasting only a few minutes which lines up images of the institution from which the underprivileged expect miracles and liberation from their daily misery: the Catholic Church, which is particularly reactionary in Colombia”, Peter B. Schumann writes about “Un día yo pregunté”. Julia de Álvarez and Carlos Álvarez frequently met with hostility for their political work and, along with other filmmakers, were imprisoned, even tortured, in July 1972. Their release from prison in February 1974 may well have been due, to a not inconsiderable extent, to the joint diplomatic efforts of the Friends of the German Cinematheque (today: Arsenal Filminstitut), the West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen and others. For Leipzig, too, the couple represented an important voice – and an example of how close the German-German connections were regarding safeguarding, copying and distributing the analogue film material of the revolutionary Latin American cinema.

Florian Wüst

Where a black hole is characterised by a region of space in which objects become trapped and prevented from escaping, a white hole is a hypothetical region of spacetime which cannot be entered from the outside, but from within which things can emerge and be released. Such is the setting for this visually rich, hypnotically abstract journey into the universe's expansive voids. “White hole” was released towards the end of a period of exceptional creative experimentation for director Toshio Matsumoto, one of Japan’s most highly acclaimed and masterful experimental film and video makers. In contrast to his earlier celluloid work, “White hole” uses video synthesizers and heavy image processing to achieve a salient cinematic experience, reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 'Stargate’ sequence from “2001: A Space Odyssey”, with similar overtones of psychedelic, and perhaps consciousness expanding cosmological exploration.

Ben Sassen

In fluid sequence, the birth of a world is depicted as a bioastronomical event. Nebulous, whirling gaseous spheres condense, becoming molten membranes, then a flashing planet. Descent into its erupting electronic forces, to the nucleus, finds the life-spark doubling and multiplying, ascending toward consciousness, into crystal symmetries. An awareness of the whole is focused into the beginning of superconsciousness. This film was preserved with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Pyramid Films

Playing hide and seek, reading out a school essay, taking a driving lesson. These scenes seem casual at first glance, but they turn out to be snapshots of life in exceptional circumstances. Only when the camera pulls back for a long shot does it reveal the refugee homes. The man behind the wheel drives briskly, explaining to the instructor that he obtained his driving license back home long ago. Two girls under a blanket tell each other stories of the time before they fled. What keeps this luminous round of scenes together is the hope of a return to normality.

Anke Leweke