They develop software, work as lifestyle coaches, own marketing agencies or an Amazon shop, travel around the world without paying for accommodation: digital nomads for whom a laptop on a suitcase is sometimes enough of a workplace. Some of their aspirations fall by the wayside in the process and become the project of an enterprising Munich-based developer: Mathias is courting rootless individualists and clever investors to become backers of a project that is to turn a deserted former luxury hotel in the Bulgarian mountains into a hip coworking space. He promises a sense of community, intense human connections and few taxes, an outdoor pool and a campfire idyll. While the nomads who dream of home are waiting for the utopia to become reality, the residents of the surrounding villages sense a new “Wind of Change” with some scepticism. A brilliant structural analysis of a business model that capitalises on modern longings and knows how to carve out the necessary space.

Jan Künemund

Countless families in the Tucumán province, one of the poorest regions in Argentina, become unemployed after the annual sugar cane harvest. The state installs so-called popular kitchens to combat hunger. Children and old people spoon the thin broth almost apathetically. “These images are stark and elementary. Without commentary, the camera confronts us with conditions of destitution that even the most eloquent pleas are unable to describe”, Peter Kress notes in the report of the 1970 West German Short Film Festival. As a counterpoint to the images, “Ollas populares” is set to the Argentinian national anthem. Can its lyrics only be understood as an expression of cynicism? Maybe it can be interpreted quite differently – as a revolutionary call to arms: “Hear the noise of broken chains. / See noble equality enthroned.” Gerardo Vallejo’s film was made in the constant fear of exposure of its authorship, which is why it is listed anonymously in the Oberhausen programme.

Florian Wüst

Mansfeld, an East German mining region: The land is gone, but the slag heaps are still there. As a mighty colossus on a barren plain, as the top of a pyramid behind a terraced house, as a dark line on the horizon. These piles of former mining waste have become imposing landmarks. Emerson Culurgioni views them as sediments of history. The carefully framed tableaus of an empty, post-industrial landscape, crossed only occasionally by a Simson moped gang whizzing by, recall James Benning’s exploration of a human-made environment. In contrast to the stillness of the images, a stream of far-reaching reflections about soil and resources, war and crises, labour and destruction, East and West, origin and identity, home and belonging meanders on the soundtrack. Layer by layer, long-dumped memories are uncovered. At the end is the question: What value do we attach to them.

Grit Lemke

“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