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

Through numerous video essays in film and media theory, Kevin B. Lee has played a key role in developing the form of the so-called desktop film. The elegant meta-staging reflects the fact that his digital desktop is research tool, media archive and distribution channel at the same time. Lee’s first feature-length film in this style dissects a historical work of propaganda: In 2014, the “Islamic State” terror militia, then at the height of its territorial power, published an elaborately produced film entitled “Flames of War”, which many media outlets compared to the aesthetics of Hollywood blockbusters. Lee manages to abstract and defamiliarize the extreme violence of those images, but comes to the realisation that their ideological power cannot be decoded by the tools of film analysis alone. “Afterlives” broadens the perspective and looks for alternative models in dialogue with experts from the arts, political education and terrorism studies: They reconstruct destroyed cultural assets, develop strategies against extremist radicalisation and study what motivates people to leave terrorist groups. In all this, Lee’s intelligent essay never loses sight of the colonialist western image of the Middle East.

Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

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

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

Five days after the coup, Chile’s most famous singer-songwriter, Víctor Jara, was brutally murdered. In recognition of his oeuvre, his political stance and also of the “victims of the fascist sadism perpetrated by the military and the CIA in Chile after 11 September 1973”, Santiago Álvarez immediately created a cinematic “report in four songs”. The musical and rhythmic structure and the simultaneous reportage style arising from found news footage and recordings of Jara reflect the agitprop language that is so typical of Álvarez. The title of the film is taken from the poem “Nuestra América” (1891) by Cuban poet José Martí. The end, too, alludes to the continuity of the anti-colonial struggle: A collage of international examples of state repression against insurgents from Puerto Rico to Vietnam and Indonesia is followed by depictions of legendary battles of liberation in 19th century South America.

Florian Wüst

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

Abtin, a young anarchist from Iran, now lives in Greece after fleeing his own country. Back home he managed an underground library of banned books and was reportedly arrested, detained and tortured because he took part in protests. He continues his political struggle in Athen’s Exarchia district – a place of left-wing utopias and a fiercely contested site of gentrification: He joins the movement for refugees, squats in houses, protests against illegal pushbacks and fights for alternative ways of living, though his own situation is highly precarious, because every contact with the state can jeopardise his residence status. Director Jasmine Alakari follows Abtin over the course of a year, experiences his rage, hope and powerlessness, but also euphoria and solidarity. Time and again, the film returns to the question of how much political activism should be allowed to shape one’s life and what role violence plays in this. Meanwhile, the conflict with the police comes to a head in the street and Abtin finds himself in the crosshairs of the state. Alakari keeps filming but realises that she must also examine her own role. What does it mean to be an observer? How far can a film visualise the fears and hopes of a person who does not have the freedom to escape this situation? “Free Zone” has no easy answer to this question but passes it on. To us – the audience.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

In a large-scale operation, a group of homeless families occupy some wasteland on the outskirts of Santiago in March 1967. When the police attempt to evict them, a little girl, Herminda, dies in her mother’s arms. The eviction is called off, the people are allowed to stay and, without any existing infrastructure, build the settlement that exists to this day: Herminda de la Victoria. “Full of errors and mistakes, [the film] is my first approach to cinema, albeit to a ‘new cinema’, a Latin American cinema marked by underdevelopment. Nonetheless, the cinematic process, editing and sound represent a fully valid experience to me. ‘Herminda de la Victoria’ champions the interests of the homeless in Chile, suffers with them, is both testimony and a ‘document’ that forces you to take sides.” (Douglas Hübner)

Florian Wüst