Using rhythmic, ecstatic music and fragments of folk songs, Yasmine Djedje-Fisher-Azoume takes us to the mythic ancestors, goddesses, and guardians of the Bété people on the Ivory Coast – the place where the director’s ancestors came from. In her film study, inspired by traditional wooden sculptures and masks, she transforms these into many-shaped female characters through coal drawings and copper reliefs. Spinning, multi-faced and all-seeing, dancing in fluffy garments, they perform rituals and unfold an infectious choreography. The whole film pulses to this rhythm, so it comes as no surprise when one figure literally releases a stream of creative energy.
This stream is so strong that it extends into the present day – to a modern temple where living goddesses rotate in the endless flow of existence. Unlike the lifelessly arranged displays in European museums, witnesses of colonial violence, Djedje-Fisher-Azoume collects a pantheon here of what she honours and deeply moves. A temple that exists only for those who know their own origins and treat them with respect to derive from them strength for the presence and the future. The whole film, from the tip of its roots to the buds, is pervaded by this power of mystical self-knowledge.

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 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.

Barbara Sykes, a master craftswoman of electronic visuals, manages to wrangle the abstract into the familiar. Bending and warping the raw colours and shapes of the Sandin Image Processor, she creates a series of images that seem to emanate from some ancient subconscious. Mixed together tightly with its percussive soundtrack, the film is a vibrant experiment in visual music.

A tinted nitrate fragment of the company film “A. Gutberlet & Co., Leipzig-Mölkau, Spezialfabrik für Falzmaschinen und Faden-Buchheftmaschinen, gegründet 1901“ (specialist in the manufacture of folding machines and thread book stitching machines, established 1901) was an exceptional find. It could be restored in its original colour tones by analogue methods in 2024 and then digitised. Combined with the dupe negative of another version, it now offers insights into the factory halls and the work on the machines.

In the 1970s, the free spirits of the Clara Mosch artist group from Karl-Marx-Stadt declared the GDR a happening zone. A poetic film portrait about the power of art.

How are art and social reality connected? How can art respond to the horrors that happen in this world every day? At what point does art become political, at what point corrupted by the market? Leon Golub (1922–2004) works on huge canvases in his New York studio, uses press photos as models, distils gestures from them, applies paint, removes it, scrapes free what was hidden. The process has a violent side – like the martial motifs of his works. They show shootings, tortures or grotesque figures that enjoy their inhuman acts. These are motifs usually unearthed by investigative journalism in times of war. Now they are hung in an exhibition room supposedly free from the banal – and shock the viewer.