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

A theatre stage, Hamlet: the "call for freedom": The ones who declaim it have learned their craft. Right here, in Rostock, they had begun their studies a month before the German reunification. 35 years later, they remember. 1990: They come from different backgrounds, from East and West. They are strangers, live in prefabricated homes. And they quickly find themselves in a maelstrom sweeping across the whole of the East: Like the factories around them, the theatre school is to be "phased out". At the same time, the "Sonnenblumenhaus" is burning in Rostock-Lichtenhagen. They must learn to organise themselves. Like pieces of a jigsaw, individual tales, supplemented by archive images and historical rehearsal videos, come together to form a picture of those times. Embodied by today’s students, who re-enact scenes from the past, the past is reflected in the present. The story of the East German student movement of the early 1990s has been almost completely erased from the collective memory today. As in Rostock, nothing at Leipzig University reminds us that the existence of a number of scientific or artistic institutes and institutions is owed solely to their commitment. "Die Klasse von 1990" is an urgently needed corrective to a Western-dominated historiography, and a lesson in self-empowerment and democracy.

Grit Lemke

Why are we so fascinated by the ancient world even today? In 2023, the viral hashtag #RomanEmpire brought to light how many people are still captivated by ancient Rome – men above all. For Pinji, the director’s uncle, this fascination has long since become a life project. He lives in an old house in Bulgaria, looks after a collection of antique treasures and has been writing a book about antiquity for years. When his nephew comes to visit, uncle Pinji does not hesitate: With humorous implacability, he launches into a rhetorical "demolition" of the present age. Toddi listens closely and decides to join the fight. He implements himself and Pinji in a computer game, right into the middle of an antique battle. Now the present is battling the past – outcome uncertain.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

French critic and activist Michèle Firk died at the age of 31 and left little behind: several texts in the film magazine Positif, the draft script for a film never made, diary entries and a farewell letter in case of her death. Taking these writings as a starting point, Laura Cazador traces out her short, radical life in the late 1950s and 1960s. A life that is not just closely connected to film history, but also the left-wing discourses and anti-imperialistic movements of that era. Firk politicised during the Algerian War, got involved in Socialist Cuba and later joined the armed struggle in Guatemala. Ben Barka, Salvador Allende, Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara drift eerily through the fascinatingly dense archival material of this film – everything connected by the idea of the Tricontinental. The Havana conference that Firk worked on was supposed to be held in 1966 and call a new, non-aligned alliance between the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America into being. Having trained as a film director herself in Cuba, Cazador grasps Firk as a point of contention and of reference for her own filmmaking in the present. The film thus reflects on the connection between cinephilia and political engagement not just based on Firk’s texts, but also with the images of the “Third Cinema”.

Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

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