At the DEFA Studios, Manfred Seifert learned a very special animation technique from Bruno J. Böttge and Jörg Herrmann: silhouette animation. Henceforth, short films about a wide variety of subjects emerged from Seifert’s workshop, including this film about safety at work and how it is communicated by managers. Over the top, but to the point.

Meike Weimann

Staßfurt, GDR, 1990. For years, hundreds of children from Namibia have grown up in the “School of Friendship” and its attached boarding school – far from their families. Integration into the life of the small town was never intended by the GDR leadership. When the political system collapses with the fall of the Berlin wall, the adolescents get caught in the crossfire of politics and the media. The film follows them through their everyday life and gives them a voice.

Philip Zengel

In this silhouette film, Manfred Seifert demonstrates the disastrous consequences of thoughtless waste disposal – true to the motto: You reap what you sow. Sometimes recycling can be a one-way street when people act as depicted in the film. As topical today as it was in the early 1980s.

Meike Weimann

Who has not seen them – films about various training opportunities and degree programmes produced by the official career guidance service? It was rare in this context, however, to come across such high-quality productions as this information film about the rare craft of leather goods making. Nothing here recalls the dusty images of ordinary career promotion films: perfect lighting and professional 35mm stock, an enthusiastic staff, qualified training, pleasant workplaces and enjoyment of work rather suggest a made-for-cinema commercial.

Meike Weimann

Baker and amateur filmmaker Manfred Seifert set out with his own camera to realise his ideas. His satirical film about Leipzig in the early 1980s became a cult reportage about the city, its buildings and the people you can meet there.

Meike Weimann

While the GDR is drawing its dying breaths and German reunification is imminent, “The GDR Children of Namibia” are forced to return to Africa at extremely short notice. The film highlights the emotional state of the children and adolescents just before their departure from the GDR and after their arrival in Windhoek. Conversations make their inner conflict palpable: they are looking forward to a possible reunion with their family, but they also leave friends and their home of the past years behind. Can one’s own country become a foreign place?

Philip Zengel

An unembellished look at the inner workings of a fur-processing facility that neither advertises it nor suggests a safe workplace. The Zwenkau film studio, which had already lost the “FDJ” suffix in 1989, unsparingly captures the conditions that the employees of the VEB Edelpelz Leipzig-Schkeuditz were exposed to. These images need no commentary but are accompanied with haunting music.
Disclaimer: This documentary film contains neither images of fur farms nor of the slaughter, skinning or killing of animals.

Meike Weimann