This both raw and tender work of memory ploughs through reflections, feelings, anecdotes, photos, and drawings, an attempt in cinematic images to capture the grief over a beloved grandfather who fell victim to cancer, make it manageable. Sonia Leliukh takes the liberty of speaking from a deliberately subjective perspective, refusing to tone down her statements with seemingly valid rules of language or etiquette. With her desktop documentary, which seems playful only at first glance, she confronts radical grief with equally radical honesty. By putting the old computer games her grandfather used to distract himself from his pain on screen, she does not only put herself in the role of the terminally ill, but also the audience. When my finger twitches to move the Solitaire cards to the right spot or click on another box at Minesweeper, I am already in the midst of things and must ask myself how I deal with grief, love, or rejection. In the present, but also and especially when the people who inspire these emotions have gone. Sonia Leliukh’s work is a cinematic refusal to allow these feelings to become objects in the sediment of the past.

Using original sound and war images, this film documents the rise of the anti-war movement within the US military. Soldiers talk about their growing anger. We see them being drilled and indoctrinated – with the consequence that the atrocities they were later responsible for during the Vietnam War were justified by military obedience. The sometimes brutal montages show that both the Vietnamese people and the American soldiers were victims of a ruthless military machine whose true profiteers, the film argues, are the arms industry and military administration. It closes with an appeal of a member of the National Guard on domestic duty to his fellow soldiers to fraternise with the protesters they are meant to keep down.

The Indonesian word “bendungan” can have various meanings. It is a term for very different structures that can contain, hold back, or block water, a dam for example, an embankment or shoreline stabilisations on rivers and oceans. For this experimental work, Jee Chan, a representative of an artistic practice between (dance) performance and expanded choreography, has talked to three persons who live near water in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Both countries are linked by the European colonisation of Southeast Asia and the ensuing crimes. Each of the incidents shared in this film reflects a different perspective on this period and its consequences, tells another story without seeking explicitly to “write history”.
Jee Chan addresses the question of how memory and knowledge become manifest not only in our memory but also in our socio-spatial environment, in waterscapes and the human body. Using choreographed gestures in tranquil long takes, oral history, and interventions in space, they make memory tangible as a multi-layered activity tied to its environment.

A quote by literary figure Johannes R. Becher, first Minister of Culture of the GDR, supplies the title of this film about the 1982 International Book Art Exhibition. Sensitively composed images embed the IBA in the hustle and bustle of Leipzig. Old and new shots of the city, in black and white and in colour, take us to some of the 82 national booths of this book art contest, accompanied by atmospheric piano music.

This animated film advertises the advantages of the “Buchclub 65” (Book Club 65), a book community founded in 1965. Membership in the community, which existed until 1990, entitled you to regularly buy books at discount prices. The nationwide supply of reading matter to the population of the GDR is emphasised, the club magazine is introduced. And once a year, there is a gift: the main recommendation book.

The GDR’s self-image as a land of books is presented in the style of a reportage, backed by figures and comparisons. Buchhaus Leipzig, the institutional operator of the central mail-order book trade, supplies the Republic with a wide variety of books and also scores with excellent organisation. An insight into distribution logistics, long before the invention of online stores.

Accompanied by fast-paced editing and pop music, a young GDR citizen explains that even in rural areas the latest in literature can be enjoyed without a problem. Shipping is quick and easy, everything can be found in the extensive catalogues of Buchhaus Leipzig! All you need to do is send a postcard … This spot is one of seven films in the “Buchhaus Leipzig” collection at the Leipzig State Archive.

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze recognised „a new type of actor” in the films of the Nouvelle Vague: professional non-professionals who do not just recite dialogue but act as a medium for our perception. Two of them were uppermost in his mind: Jean-Pierre Léaud and her, Bulle Ogier. The French performer has appeared in nearly 100 films over a period of more than 50 years. However, the masterpieces she was involved in were often not appreciated as such by her contemporaries but, as critic Philippe Azoury puts it, regarded as child’s play.
This is what makes this cinephile biogram, which, apart from a few conversations, consists mainly of archive material and a wealth of intelligently selected and edited film clips, so special: Eugénie Grandval’s portrait recalls a time when cinema was bursting its bonds and anything seemed possible. Playing parts that were never repeated and yet followed an astonishingly consistent arc, Bulle Ogier not only became an icon of that period but something of a co-author of the directors she worked with, whether they were called Barbet Schroeder, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marguerite Duras or Jacques Rivette. Rarely has a film about film sparked such an appetite for rediscovery.

The painted lady butterfly travels 9,000 miles over several generations. Each generation flies to the next place without knowing the starting or end point of their route. The Hakka people, whose name translates as “guest family”, share this fate of constant movement – their identity is not tied to a specific territory but to their ancestors. The director, Hakka herself, follows her family’s migration history from their roots in northern China to Canada and India. As she traces their footsteps, she encounters Hakka from all over the world who tell their own stories of departure, adaptation, and the preservation of a unique culture.
Archive material, personal reflections, and interviews with members of the global diaspora combine to create the polyphonic portrait of a community whose language, customs, and collective memory are threatened by extinction. The film asks how identity is formed when one’s home keeps shifting – and how roots can be put down at ever new places without losing sight of one’s origin.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative committee of the House of Representatives, was founded in 1938 to crack down on sympathisers of Nazi Germany in the US. In the post-war period, the Committee dedicated itself to anti-communism, interrogating countless individuals it regarded as “oppositional” or found guilty of “subversion” because of left-wing views. Robert Cohen’s film both chronicles and dismantles HUAC, working with a collage of archive material, interviews passionately spoken into the camera and scenes of satirical re-enactment. He makes no secret of his criticism of this symbol of an authoritarian power structure that committed injustices under the pretext of freedom.

The well-known illustrator Werner Klemke uses his drawings to teach the youngest bookworms about the value of reading. Taking this as a starting point, Lotte Thiel presents the GDR as a land of books whose capital is Leipzig. Figures and images from the 1971 International Book Art Exhibition underscore the significance accorded to books as a tool for shaping the “socialist personality”.

The Super8 material that has been stored in a private archive since 1982 is a conundrum, showing art, demolished buildings, and squatted houses in early 1980s West Berlin. A so-called Artificial Intelligence is consulted to explore the connections between the images. Interestingly, it comes up with references to the ancient capital of the Median Empire and later royal residence of the Achaemenids. We also learn surprising things about the significance of red turtleneck jumpers for gay emancipation and discover the functions of broom and hose. Accompanied by a confusing sound collage, the graffiti on the walls of a much-described city point to an exciting subcultural tradition. A young man looks into the camera. It is the artist Gerhard Faulhaber.