The fox and the wild boar live on a hill in the forest and discover the world together. Autumn is coming. Delighted, they observe one leaf after the other drift down from the branches. Then the wild boar lures the fox on a hike to the great “Leaf Tree” where countless leaves are still waiting to tumble through the air. An adventurous journey begins where Fox has to pass one test after the other. An adaptation of the popular Polish comic book series by Berenika Kolomycka.

Lina Dinkla

“Tire dié” begins with aerial shots of Santa Fe, Fernando Birri’s hometown. We hear a litany of statistical data that gradually and parodically turn into more and more trivial facts about the city. The camera approaches the town’s outskirts with their informal settlements, drops from its airy heights down to the eye-level of those who talk about their daily struggle for survival. Often it is the children who bring the necessary coins home. Every afternoon, they go begging along the nearby two-kilometre railway bridge. Running barefoot along the train that connects Santa Fe with Buenos Aires, they hold their hands up to the travellers at the windows, incessantly calling “tire dié” (throw a dime). The last third of the film, which marks the birth of the new Latin American cinema, is an equally breathtaking and harrowing montage of this daring endeavour.

Florian Wüst

On New Year's Eve 2023, Thomas Heise begins to shoot his new film. It is to be called “Übergang”. His idea: A film in the “Heimatfilm” tradition revolving around Berlin’s Schönhauser Allee, where he has lived for decades. The author is to be a character in the film. A few months later, Heise falls seriously ill and dies. The small team continues to work on the film, unearthing unpublished texts and images from Heise’s estate and archives. “Images are […] encompassing”, Heiner Müller is quoted, but dreams curdle quickly. As soon as the personal story becomes a false image, it is gently but persistently put into perspective. A touching email exchange Heise had with a female high-school graduate in Karlsruhe who is searching for truth contains a whole primer for documentary filmmaking: “See what you would not otherwise see. Stay patient. […] Never expect financial security. Be happy about that. Because it won’t change.” Peter Badel and Chris Wright have not produced a hermetic artist tribute, but have, utterly in the spirit of Heise, pieced together fragments of lived history.

Jan Künemund

French critic and activist Michèle Firk died at the age of 31 and left little behind: several texts in the film magazine Positif, the draft script for a film never made, diary entries and a farewell letter in case of her death. Taking these writings as a starting point, Laura Cazador traces out her short, radical life in the late 1950s and 1960s. A life that is not just closely connected to film history, but also the left-wing discourses and anti-imperialistic movements of that era. Firk politicised during the Algerian War, got involved in Socialist Cuba and later joined the armed struggle in Guatemala. Ben Barka, Salvador Allende, Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara drift eerily through the fascinatingly dense archival material of this film – everything connected by the idea of the Tricontinental. The Havana conference that Firk worked on was supposed to be held in 1966 and call a new, non-aligned alliance between the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America into being. Having trained as a film director herself in Cuba, Cazador grasps Firk as a point of contention and of reference for her own filmmaking in the present. The film thus reflects on the connection between cinephilia and political engagement not just based on Firk’s texts, but also with the images of the “Third Cinema”.

Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

Szymon and Franek live near the river Oder, where Poland and Germany meet. They spend everyspare moment with their friends at the skate park, a place where everyone meets, no matter where they come from. This short documentary, shot on 16mm, follows two children growing up in a border region who wonder what borders actually are: Something tangible, like the river they look at, or something that exists only in their minds?

Lina Dinkla

“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

He is „always sad“, says Uncle Thuận. Connected via mobile phone with his family who are scattered across the world he sings sentimental songs about spring in Hanoi. Meanwhile, his wife Thúy tirelessly looks after the restaurant that the two have been managing in North Rhine-Westphalia for twenty years. They came to the GDR as contract workers at the age of 19. In conversations with their daughters, life stories unfold in which they were rarely expected to decide anything but always to work hard and to function. A role they accept without complaint and justify even today. But the protective shell accumulated over decades increasingly begins to show cracks. And somewhere in the endless routines and tasks of a restaurant kitchen which also structure the film, a question quietly emerges: the question of happiness. In Minh Anh Nguyễn, a post-migrant generation speaks up who regard contract work and racism in the GDR not as a closed chapter but as part of their history. Casual and very close to her protagonists, she tells of colonial legacies that have inscribed themselves into biographies and across generations. At the same time, she shows how this cycle can be broken: By the daughters asking questions which – even outside the Vietnamese community and above all in the East – are long overdue.

Grit Lemke