A call for radical political change, an agitation pamphlet for the national liberation of Argentina: Like few other films, “La hora de los hornos” stirred the generation of 1968 all over the world. The more than four-hour-long film essay was banned for many years, not just in Argentina. Taking the form of a multilayered documentary collage, it is a masterful exploration of the possibilities of image-sound-editing which unfolds a panorama of the prevailing social and political conditions. “Neocolonialismo y violencia” analyses the colonisation of Latin America, its economic and cultural dependence on the industrialised states of the so-called First World, especially the USA, as well as the omnipresence of violence. The second part, “Acto para la liberación”, delivers a chronicle of Peronism and the resistance after Perón’s fall in 1955. “Violencia y liberación”, the shorter third part, openly advocates armed struggle. After two years of clandestine work by a small team around Fernando E. Solanas and Octavio Gentino, “La hora de los hornos” had its world premiere on 2 June 1968 at the Mostra Internazionale del Cinema Nuovo in Pesaro. The Friends of the German Cinematheque (today: Arsenal Filminstitut) screened the three-part film only a few weeks later on the occasion of the Berlinale. After the opening of the Arsenal cinema in January 1970 on Welserstraße in Berlin-Schöneberg, countless screenings of the distribution prints of the film followed at their own venue and elsewhere.

Florian Wüst

Cuban documentary film was never aimed only at its own nation but saw its task as providing information about the events in the so-called Third World. Well-known films by Santiago Álvarez deal with the anti-imperialist struggles in Vietnam and Laos. Starting in the late 1970s, the focus was expanded to include the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, a shift clearly reflected in the Leipzig festival programmes. Meanwhile, in 1980, Oberhausen screened, in addition to the retrospective “Cinema in Cuba 1959–1979”, Bernabé Hernández’s “La infancia de Marisol”. The film was one of the first Cuban productions made after the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution in July 1979. It is based on the accounts of 14-year-old Marisol who describes how she joins the Sandinista Liberation Front, fights against the dictatorship, is taken prisoner and, like her father and brother, brutally tortured. The film ends with the prospect of a new life: Marisol’s studies in Cuba.

Florian Wüst

Schnapps is carefully poured into hip flasks and handed to the men. Their faces are marked by the traces of homeless life. A housing project in Berlin Kreuzberg gives them more than a roof over their head. The people who work here listen to them, accompany them to the doctor and hand out controlled amounts of alcohol. The project’s approach is consistently addiction-accepting – without the enforcement of abstinence and with the goal of relieving the affected persons from existential pressure. In this protected space, the men can breathe freely again after many years of living in the streets, rediscover their own personality and dignity. The camera follows some of the residents and social workers over several years, always at eye-level, showing the work of this institution and leaving space for the men’s personal stories. A fragile community emerges in front of the lens.

Anke Leweke

After the military coup in Brazil in March 1964, the new rulers stopped the fairer distribution of land that had already begun. The agrarian reforms implemented instead favoured big land owners and the agribusiness sector; unions were suppressed. Against this backdrop, Paulo Rufino and Ana Carolina address the struggles and hardships of agricultural labourers. In a free and poetical style, they assemble photographs, film sequences, quotes in words and images into an experimental collage that probes the limits of the documentary. In particular, they play with the instrument of repetition – in a kind of non-linear interpretation of “Lavra Dor” (1962) and other poems by Mário Chamie. The film was screened in the “Week of New Cinema: Latin America” section of the 1970 Berlinale which was compiled by Peter B. Schumann. Four years earlier, Schumann had already shown a cross section of the Brazilian “Cinema Novo” in West Berlin as part of the festival’s retrospective.

Florian Wüst