„My life is a prison“, Adelina says. The young woman is smoking and looking into the camera, her parents sitting on the sofa to her right and left. In black and white and the narrow 4:3 ratio, this family scene feels oppressive: Adeline spent eleven years under house arrest here, with a father who refuses to accept her identity and a mother who seems loving but powerless. In Georgia, there is neither freedom nor security for trans persons like Adelina. Anti-queer attacks happen in broad daylight; the legal situation of the LGBTQ community has recently deteriorated further. When the protagonist at last leaves her parents’ village to go to Vienna, the style of Rati Tsiteladze’s debut film also changes. The lipstick glows red, the lights of the big city neon yellow. A different, freer life seems possible. But the freedom brings new challenges: financial and health problems, communicating in a foreign language – and loneliness. “A Song Without Home” is the intimate, impressionistic long-term portrait of a person who wants to define herself and clings to an unshakeable conviction: “No law can erase who we are.”

Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

A Palestinian woman, Hind Mashahra, longs for motherhood, but this seems hardly possible as her husband is serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison and is barred from marital visits. Smuggling her husband’s sperm out of prison may be the only chance for her to become a mother again. The documentary follows Hind as she sets out on a risky mission to obtain and deliver her husband’s sample to a fertility clinic. Her repeated attempts are hampered by the traffic, checkpoints, and the short life of semen, perishing within just hours. Unadorned in its language, the film stays close to Hind’s inner experience in the throes of drama, shaped by the reality in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as in quieter moments of waiting that are no less charged. Weaving in accounts of other prisoners’ wives, the documentary chronicles a Palestinian woman’s journey as she pursues motherhood at an extraordinary cost.

Sevara Pan

Thick smoke clouds rise at the horizon. Oil bubbles from the ground. The gills of a dead fish are black. A sonorous voice recites a poem about blood, anger and the oil-contaminated landscape of the Niger Delta. A crowd of people join in for the refrain. Writer and activist Nnimmo Bassey has been protesting for decades again the oil extraction in the south of Nigeria and its consequences for humans, nature and agriculture. The Ogoni, an ethnic minority from the region, are particularly affected, with their whole basis for life under existential threat as a result. In the 1990s, they organised a powerful political movement, which was violently put down by the military government – also in the interest of Western oil concerns. How is it possible to put up political resistance in such circumstances? “Hope Is a Word” is the portrait of a man who believes in the power of poetic language. With his workshops, Nnimmo Bassey manages to mobilise a new generation of rhetorically and literarily gifted activists. When they read, rap or recite, the film puts their words into the frame in demonstrative fashion. Poetry becomes a political tool here. For a call can come from a verse, a call that others then follow.

Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

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

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

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

Jorge Sanjinés’ short film “Revolución” (1963) was one of the first Latin American films, beside the Cuban films, to be screened in Leipzig in 1964. With his documentary feature “Yawar Mallku” (Sangre de Condor), Sanjinés took a step towards a cinema that makes history. Told in flashbacks, the film is based on real events: US American development aid workers secretly sterilise indigenous women. The chief of a Quechua community discovers the crime; the village community takes revenge. He is finally shot down by the police and survives, badly injured. He is taken to town, but the rescue attempt fails: There is no money for a blood transfusion. The film challenges both “Yankee Imperialism” and the Bolivian class society. As a consequence of the initially banned public screening, the so-called Peace Corps had to leave the country. “Yawar Mallku” had its premiere in West Berlin as part of the 1970 Berlinale’s “Week of New Cinema: Latin America”. Thereafter the Friends of the German Cinematheque (today: Arsenal Filminstitut) showned Sanjinés’ film multiple times at the Arsenal Cinema over the years, including under the heading “Birth Control as Genocide” in the context of the First International Women’s Film Seminar in November 1973. It enjoyed the same esteem in the East: One of only three Latin American films found in the “Film-Blätter: Kurzmonographien zu klassischen Filmen" (Film Sheets: Brief Monographs on Classical films) of the GDR’s State Film Archive, “Das Blut des Condors” (The Blood of the Condor) is listed under No. 183.

Florian Wüst