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

What is left when everything fades away? An old photographer tries to reconstruct people and events by means of old photographs, but they keep slipping away from him, vanishing in the dark, washed away by the waves. In his 2D animated film, rendered in black and white, Anton Dyakov not only shows how memories are lost, but also how they sometimes haunt and overwhelm us – for example in the shape of a disturbing archive fragment of blurred war photos. “Black Box” deals with loss and grief from a personal, yet universal perspective, while referencing the culture of remembrance in the digital age which is increasingly managing – or seeking to manage – without the haptic assurance of a printed photo.

Marie Ketzscher

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

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