Anyone interned in the Nazi Jewish transit and collection camp Westerbork in the occupied Netherlands faced death: The trains left to Auschwitz from here, to Sobibór. In 1944, the camp commander ordered the prisoner and cameraman Rudolf Breslauer, who was murdered shortly afterwards, to film the camp, presumably as visual evidence of his own “work performance”. Harun Farocki, West German doyen of essayistic image criticism, used the surviving silent material to compose an equally silent sequence analysis commented only in title cards. It is surgery on the hidden narrative, not open heart surgery.

On a train to Rostov-on-Don in 1980, Malian-Mauritanian bursary holder Abderrahmane Sissako met the Angolan Afonso Baribanga, who had also been sent to the USSR. Both are supposed to learn Russian. Sissako studied film directing at the WGIK in Moscow, while Baribanga pursued a different career and eventually returned to Angola, where a post-colonial civil war was raging. Years later, Sissako sets off in search of his vanished friend, travelling to his own and Baribanga’s African homelands, where the old and new world powers have left devastating traces. In 1997, in a side section, DOK Leipzig presented the feature-length version of Sissako’s travelogue, which is steeped in contemporary and colonial history. The 2024 Retrospective presents an abridged version.