One of the first productions of San Francisco Newsreel, a local offshoot of the nationwide network of Newsreel collectives, demonstrated solidarity with the Black Panther Party against the ghettoization of Black Communities in the cities and against police violence. “Off the Pig! – Death to the cops!” is the battle-call of the militarily organised protesters in the streets of Los Angeles. They demand the release of imprisoned Black Panther founding member Huey Newton. The latter speaks at length in a prison interview, as do his co-fighters Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale. What they say and read out is aimed at nothing less than a revolution, a violent overthrow that is to liberate the Black US population from white supremacy.

“Why should I move? I was born here.” While a senseless war is waged in Vietnam and million-dollar rockets are shot to the moon, there is not enough decent housing in New York – and worse, the poor are being forcibly evicted from their homes, says an angry protagonist of this activist film which introduces the New York squatter movement. Latin Americans in particular are forced to leave the lucrative Manhattan housing market, but the protesters do not accept this without putting up a fight. “Break & Enter” is a spontaneous and encouraging film document about self-organised communities based on solidarity.

Lee Anne Schmitt’s first feature-length essay tours through California’s former company towns, which originally sprung up to house those working in the state’s primary industries and later slipped into dereliction or oblivion with the arrival of globalisation. Ghostly shots of decaying homes and dilapidated facilities rub up against vistas of verdant nature and open horizons, just as tales of prejudice and exploitation intermingle with thwarted utopian dreams. Augmenting her own ravishing 16mm footage with archive material, historical photographs and contemporary radio soundbites, Schmitt scours this hybrid landscape like a beachcomber for all the ideological traces it holds, whereby no story nor detail is too small to be excavated.

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.

Sarajevo–Rimini. This route once took ten-year-old Mirela to safety from the Bosnian War in 1992, when she was evacuated to Italy by a United Nations convoy along with a group of other orphans. Their stay was to be temporary, but no one came to pick her up. So Mirela began a new life on the Adriatic coast. As an adult, she returns to her homeland in search of a mother whom she last saw as a four-year-old, a journey accompanied by many questions: Why was she among the few who were sent to exile? Would it have been better to have stayed in Sarajevo, free of guilt? Mirela finds no clear answers. But from the traces she gathers and the threads that cross in her life, “Dom” weaves a sensitive meditation about identity and belonging.

Doing research in Swiss museums, Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige comes across objects in storage that were collected as evidence of the life of an Indigenous Adivasi community in her country. Even though Switzerland had no colonies, it benefited from the colonial system. Between 1883 and 1913, naturalists Fritz and Paul Sarasin organised expeditions to British Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies. They explored these areas – assisted by forced labourers – and brought exotic animals, plants and artefacts, as well as human skulls and skeletons to Basel: The result was one of the largest ethnological collections in German-speaking Europe – paradigmatic of colonial violence and Eurocentric scientific pretensions. Sri Lanka demanded their return as early as the 1970s, but Switzerland refused.
Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige travels along the Sarasins’ route and, together with Adivasi representatives, campaigns once again for restitution. An obstacle course through bureaucracy and rigid museum structures begins. The film consistently follows the interdisciplinary artist and co-author of the script as she creatively and investigatively negotiates ownership issues, shedding a highly uncomfortable light on the colonial entanglements and their still existing blind spots in the global North.

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.

The train ride is deadly boring. The landscape rushes past as a buzzing surrealist kaleidoscope of colours and Ariel and Paul pass the time by drawing their worst nightmares for each other. For Paul it is his mother swimming towards him on the open sea to drag him underwater, for Ariel it is the confrontation with a psychotic woman in the bathtub. What starts out as a game turns uncanny when fellow traveller Gilda joins them – and begins to tell them that the eeriest thing ever happened to her. She hypnotised her demented husband in his sleep. The one who answered her had been none other than God. An indignant God, a disgruntled God and finally a downright angry God, for she had absolutely refused to stop asking her sleeping husband: “Why do we exist?”
With an incredibly precise sense for the moment when the profane suddenly develops the potential for horror, Jocelyn Charles takes us on a magnificent psycho-trip. The director leaves it to the audience to determine whether to watch the 2D animation as spot-on genre entertainment or whether to take in the undertones: the hubris of humans who constantly play God and want to solve every mystery, for example. A hubris that does not remain without consequences.

In life, people do things they are proud of, and others they are not proud of – but it is impossible not to be proud of having participated in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), even if the Spanish Republic and its alliance of International Brigades lost. This is one of the American veterans whose war memories – bitter, but marked by self-respect – are honoured by this film. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade consisted of US volunteers who fought against Spanish and German fascism and for democracy under adverse conditions and without party affiliations until 1939, while the US government pursued a strict and ultimately fatal policy of appeasement. A refreshingly undogmatic document with a wealth of fresh archive material.

In 1965, the longest farm workers’ strike in US-American history unrolled in Delano, California. Led by Cesar Chavez, the as yet unorganised Mexican seasonal labourers fought successfully for better working conditions and the right to found a union of their own, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). “¡Huelga!” is the partisan portrait of an emerging solidarity group that not only stood up against the unregulated capitalism in the agricultural sector but also declared war on the racism of the white landowners. In addition to depicting the mechanisms of the strike, the mobile camera also makes a point of documenting the degrading living conditions of the people who kept one of the most powerful industries in the country going.

To put it bluntly, one could say that most of de Antonio’s films are courtroom dramas. In this sense, “In the King of Prussia” is typical – and at the same time unusual, starting with the title. King of Prussia is a small town in Pennsylvania which became the scene of an action by radical Christian pacifists in September 1980. They broke into a factory where, unbeknownst to the public, parts of the nuclear missile Mark 12A were produced, and held a happening inspired by the Sermon on the Mount and Fluxus. The film is a re-enactment, but not of the action, rather of the trial against the so-called Plowshares Eight. In de Antonio’s first video production, shot in the trial breaks, the defendants played themselves. The role of the judge was played by New Hollywood star Martin Sheen.

The film opens with an image of the statue of Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette who fought on the side of the rebels in the American War of Independence (1775–1783), to which is added a diffuse soundscape in which one can distinguish the extremely slowed down noise of helicopter rotors. “The music of America today is the helicopter in Vietnam. That’s ‘musique concrète’,” de Antonio explained in 1969. By recalling a time when the so-called New World was a British colony itself, the US invasion of Vietnam is put in the context of a long history of liberation whose contemporary heroe is the Vietnamese people. “In the Year of the Pig” remains one of the most unusual and illuminating films about this war and others that followed.