The married couple Angelika and Horst Butter sum up successes and setbacks of their joint amateur filmmaking. They now produce elaborate puppet animations in their private rooms, under sometimes adverse conditions. They adapt fairy tale and fantasy sources, but also take up topical social issues, for example in an entertaining vision for International Women’s Day.

East Berlin plays host to the world at the 10th World Youth Festival. The secret capital of the GDR, Leipzig, also gets some reflected glory. On 3 August 1973, festival delegations from forty countries take a special train to the trade fair city. Between the official events there is room for ambiguous side glances, captured in this report of the day made by several Leipzig company and amateur film groups.

The women’s committees in the GDR factories promote the technical and ideological-political qualification of female staff members. However, the film identifies deficits in the women’s private environment, since the men by their side often support their professional development only to a limited extent and the women’s multiple responsibilities persist despite state support.

A creative and skilful montage as well as dramatically spot-on sound and music effects are combined in a snappy plot to offer a mordant commentary on the constitutionally enshrined equality of men and women in the GDR. The film was awarded a medal at the 1982 congress of UNICA, the Union Internationale du Cinéma, in Aachen.

Following a quarrel with the DEFA, the Sorbian animation and documentary filmmaker Jan Hempel established the independent IWT-Film studio in Dresden. Commissioned by the German Book Traders’ Association, these impressions of the 1977 International Book Art Exhibition were created there. Referencing Leipzig’s century-old tradition as a book city, the film presents production companies, publishers and, last but not least, the IBA itself.

The self-taught nature filmmaker Ingeborg Tölke uses quotes from literary encounters with the flora and fauna of the moor in a gentle approach to this landscape. With great empathy, she uncovers the often all-too-hastily overlooked beauties and cruelties of the place, using time-lapse and macro techniques. Her debut work, which was also amazing in terms of film craft, won several awards.

What was unsuccessful 400 years earlier in the German Peasants’ Wars is achieved in 1945 by the unbreakable bond with the Soviet Union: Under adverse conditions, workers and peasants build a socialist state. In 1970, when this film was made, the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) asserts its claim to leadership grounded in the past – it moves forward on the “Way from the I to the We”.

Moscow, summer 1957: The famous amateur filmmaker Alfred Dorn takes us to the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students, which was intended to promote encounters and exchange between young people from all over the world as a reaction to the Second World War. Curious and amazed, the camera explores the metropolis Moscow with its iconic buildings and squares, complete with numerous festival visitors.

Opening the film is a highly visible Soviet coat of arms with translations of Marx’s call “Workers of the world, unite!” into several languages. In the middle of a media circus, representatives of the Soviet Union restituted art treasures to the GDR. The highlight was the return of “evacuated” objects to the Green Vault in Dresden.

Under the banner of international solidarity, Arab children from refugee camps in Jordan are spending a holiday in the GDR in 1970. This political gesture ties in with the recently redefined position of the GDR in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the World Youth Festival in 1973, Yasser Arafat was already seen standing next to Erich Honecker on camera.

Accompanying Liselotte Schließer, who worked full time as a technical draughtswoman, in her private and professional daily life. She talks about the passion that became her second mission in life. The only woman in organised amateur filmmaking for many years and now head of the amateur filmmakers’ association of Radebeul, she still misses female directors and camera people.

After the military coup in Chile and the death of Salvador Allende in 1973, tens of thousands of opposition members were persecuted and murdered. The GDR took in about 2,000 refugees, including nine-year-old Tania and her family. The fact that the GDR was initially sceptical about Allende’s politics and granted political asylum only to selected Chileans is part of the logic of a bipolar world order.

Pensioner Lehmann, folk artist Köppe, engineer Krahnstöver and the famous painter Willi Sitte: Four GDR citizens explain their motives and actions for solidarity with Vietnam. The emphasis is on the global nature of the protests against the war in the Far East, also and especially in Western countries, and therefore the system-spanning character of the movement. An appeal to the audience to get involved.

On the occasion of the GDR Landeskulturgesetz (Law on the Conservation and Protection of the Environment), passed in 1970, the speaker explains the various aspects of environmental protection through vivid, visually pointed examples. The film repeatedly refers to the fundamental contradiction between exploitation and preservation of nature in a developed industrial state but is unable to resolve it.

With no introduction, the audience find themselves in the middle of the film’s subject. Soviet ballet master Arkady Sakharov instructs the children’s and youth dance ensemble of the Radebeul district’s arts centre with an insistent voice. Belarussian, Ukrainian, Uzbek and Russian folk dances are rehearsed under his strict guidance and performed at the packed local arts centre.