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

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

“Still I believe / We are created, free and equal / Now / Now / Now …” US-American singer Lena Horne interpreted the Hebrew song “Hava Nagila” with different lyrics: “Now!” (1963) became an anthem of the civil rights movement in the USA, while Santiago Álvarez’s film of the same name rose to become an agitprop classic. He edited photographs and a few short moving image sequences of racial discrimination, police violence and white terror to the rhythm of Horne’s song. The International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week alone screened “Now!” five times in two decades after it had won the Golden Dove in 1965. The presence of Cuban documentary film in Leipzig amounted to a long success story, not least thanks to Álvarez, its best-known exponent. In addition to screenings of his films, he served several times as a member of the International Jury. Even after the controversy surrounding his stance on the Prague Spring 1968, Álvarez continued to be a regular guest.

Florian Wüst

Encouraged by the UN Resolution of 6 November 1974, which condemned the human rights violations of the Chilean military dictatorship, relatives of imprisoned and disappeared persons first began to join forces. Whether in this or other initiatives fighting for a return of democracy to Chile, the resistance was always primarily driven by women. It became more and more visible in the 1980s, not least due to the creativity of their forms of action. One example: On 30 October 1985, the “Mujeres por la vida” organised a protest in the Providencia district of Santiago under the slogan “Somos+” (We are more). The women formed three rows moving towards each other, each holding a ribbon in one of Chile’s national colours. The video documentation of the protest and its violent breakup by the police won multiple awards at the 1986 West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen.

Florian Wüst

“A polemical short film lasting only a few minutes which lines up images of the institution from which the underprivileged expect miracles and liberation from their daily misery: the Catholic Church, which is particularly reactionary in Colombia”, Peter B. Schumann writes about “Un día yo pregunté”. Julia de Álvarez and Carlos Álvarez frequently met with hostility for their political work and, along with other filmmakers, were imprisoned, even tortured, in July 1972. Their release from prison in February 1974 may well have been due, to a not inconsiderable extent, to the joint diplomatic efforts of the Friends of the German Cinematheque (today: Arsenal Filminstitut), the West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen and others. For Leipzig, too, the couple represented an important voice – and an example of how close the German-German connections were regarding safeguarding, copying and distributing the analogue film material of the revolutionary Latin American cinema.

Florian Wüst

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