First we hear a crackling sound, then a diffuse orange light glows in the darkness. A siren growing louder and the sound of a helicopter instantly mark the scene as a place of danger. There is a fire. First in the distance, a moment later everywhere. Trees and palms go up in flames. The fire’s power is immense. The firefighters and everyone else who is fighting the wildfires around Los Angeles act with remarkable calm. Nobody is running, the communication chain is working smoothly, TV reporters are broadcasting live, helpers are setting up emergency shelters, taking care of injured animals, cutting fire lines in front of neighbours’ homes. A tried-and-tested routine, efficiency and a great willingness to help. The crisis seems to bring out the best in the people. This uncommented observation is also a tribute to their commitment. But the longer it goes on, the more the question arises why solidarity and sustainable action seem to work in emergencies, while it seems impossible to tackle the crisis before it becomes an inferno. The film’s cinematic meditation on pyropolitics takes a look at our age of multiple crises. The permanent global fire management makes it easy to forget that behind those fires lie geopolitical causes that must be dealt with – not with water, but with political decisions.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Raúl Ruiz was part of the militant cinema movement that put itself in the service of the Chilean Popular Front, but remained an outsider. He employed experiment and irony to dissect social contradictions. In “Abastecimiento”, Ruiz addresses the supply problems under the Unidad Popular government, confronting the views of a woman from a bourgeois background with those of the socialist Minister for Economic Affairs. He follows this with a depiction of the activities of the Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios (JAP), locally organised committees for the control and just distribution of food and everyday goods. The provocative juxtaposition paints a picture of an impossible dialogue. The film was banned at the time and was believed lost for ages. It was only recently rediscovered. Leipzig was not the place for the feature film director who emigrated to Paris after the military coup, but Ruiz was a frequent guest at the Berlinale Forum.

Florian Wüst

Ugo Ulive left his native Uruguay in 1967 to move to the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, where two years later he realised three short films at the newly founded Centro de Cine Documental de la Universidad de los Andes: “Caracas: dos o tres cosas”, “Diamantes” and “Basta!”. The latter was part of the Leipzig retrospective “Film in the People’s Struggle for Liberation: Latin America” in 1972. Inspired by Antonin Artaud’s concept of the “Theatre of Cruelty”, it stands out for disturbing images of an autopsy that reveal the degree of dehumanisation under the influence of imperialism. In “Caracas: dos o tres cosas”, also in the form of an experimental collage, Ulive, roaming the streets of Caracas with his camera, contrasts the public face of a divided society with audio fragments from radio, advertising and pop music.

Florian Wüst

The Europe-wide protests against Chile’s military dictatorship were expressed not only by political activism, but by a host of artistic actions. The colourful aesthetics of the Unidad Popular’s street art, popularised by the Ramona Parra Brigades, became a visual trademark. Based on this model, the Brigada Pablo Neruda, for example, whose members included well-known Chilean artists exiled in Paris like José Balmes, Gracia Barrios and Guillermo Núñez, realised a 60-metre-long mural on the fringes of documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. Its creation was documented in Franz Lehmkuhl’s film “Chilenische Wandmalerei” (1977–80), screened in Leipzig in 1980. In his agitation film “Chile lebt”, co-produced with Michael Börner, the Chilean journalist and filmmaker Juan Forch uses pictures of the Brigada Pablo Neruda to express what keeps hope in his homeland alive: international solidarity. In 1979, Forch returned to Chile from exile in the GDR.

Florian Wüst

What does a person’s library say about them? James Paul Dallas doesn’t just create a portrait of a life, but also shows a present in which possession, memory and identity are all becoming shaky. In early 2025, the anonymous protagonist guides the director via mobile phone through his empty apartment in Brooklyn. What can stay and what can go in what was his home for 20 years? The kitchen crockery is first up, then the books. Giacometti and Basquiat can stay in New York. But please pack up everything between Lequeu and Brick. A course is thus tracked through an intimate microcosm. It’s not just one individual’s paths to wisdom that are being measured out here, but also his desires, preferences and guilty pleasures. The footage gives fragmentary glimpses into a private world, piquing the curiosity and sparking the imagination of all those watching: what were all the things that happened in this apartment? What sort of person lived here? And why does he have to give up all these things, and maybe even a part of himself?

Borjana Gaković

In 1977, Valentin Milanow, a Bulgarian student at the GDR Academy of Film and Television, sat in at the DEFA Studio for Documentary Films. Director Rainer Ackermann was assigned as his mentor. Milanow came up with the idea of portraying the reality of life of exiled Chileans in the GDR. He was friends with a young couple, Alejandra Holzapfel and José Fuica, who lived in the same prefabricated housing estate in Potsdam-Babelsberg. She studied veterinary medicine, he was training to be a teacher of Marxism-Leninism. Milanow was allowed to film their wedding. On the fringes of the seemingly happy celebration, conversations turn to memories of interrogations and torture by the military junta and worries about relatives who were left behind. What the bride herself did not reveal at the time: As a leftist underground fighter she had been exposed to the worst abuse in the “Venda Sexy” prisoners’ camp and others. Today, this place is the memorial site Asociación de Memoria y Derechos Humanos Irán 3030. It is run by Alejandra Holzapfel.

Florian Wüst

This documentary, whose title is a line from one of Pablo Neruda’s poems, is a snapshot of Chile after two years of military dictatorship. In the agitational Cold War rhetoric typical of Studio H & S, it portrays both representatives of the regime and the victims of the terror, who are beginning to organise themselves as they search for the arrested and disappeared. Walter Heynowski, Gerhard Scheumann and Peter Hellmich had spent several months in Chile in early 1973 to record Allende’s reform efforts as well as the machinations of the far-right forces. Hellmich stayed longer: On 11 September 1973, he managed to film the legendary footage of the bombing of the Presidential Palace, conducted the first interview with General Augusto Pinochet after the coup and filmed political prisoners in the Chacabuco concentration camp in the Atacama Desert. For the extremely risky interviews and filming of “Eine Minute Dunkel macht uns nicht blind”, Studio H & S had to send a West German team – Gerhard Biroth, George Boultwood and Frederico Füllgraf – to Chile. Their true intention behind the transparent pretext of “filming the landscape for the promotion of tourism” and documenting “the economic success of the Pinochet government” remained undetected, as Füllgraf remembers, despite constant surveillance and thanks to all kinds of tricks. This screening is the premiere of the restored and digitized version of the film which was supported by the Förderprogramm Filmerbe (Digitisation of German film heritage funding programme).

Florian Wüst