It’s only after the separation from her husband that another man tells her how valuable she is: the Chladek family, she’s a teacher, he’s a student. The first few years were nothing but quarrels: the Surau family, he’s a plumber, she’s a postal worker. Should she really intend to get further education at evening school, he won’t accept this: the Lehmann family, he’s a locksmith, she’s a lecturer. Three thirtysomething couples live in the Potsdam high-rise behind whose windows Petra Tschörtner looked for her graduation film. Long interviews that pierce the surface at once, equally revealing and oppressive. Promptly awarded a prize at the West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen.

In works like “Guide Dog Ruepel” (1962), Bärbl Bergmann was the first feature film director in the GDR to portray children in their often pitiless but also honest dealings with each other, something that was almost impossible in the documentary films of that period. But she also managed to sneak lessons on how to pursue educational goals with creative obstinacy into popular science films. Thus her educational piece about two boys who discover that magic, too, requires hard work, despite its rational approach, is far from disenchanting: The protagonists reach their conclusion via detours that take them through mysterious corridors, furtive looks through keyholes and bewitching dreams.

The interviews conducted by Tamara Trampe in a Pankow kindergarten testify to a rare attempt to enter the world of the young interviewees completely, to give their stories a space where reality and fantasy, worries and wishes can mix freely. A space that’s not always provided in the daily life of the kindergarten, as the film casually suggests even after it was toned down by the DEFA censors: toilets without doors, ghastly birthday parties and friendly but unmistakable reprimands when the children let too much dialect slip into the grammar exercise or when their pictures of soldiers are not realistic enough.

High up north, in the Stralsund People’s Dockyard, Gitta Nickel encounters a youth brigade whose members speak frankly: “I’m 27 now. Judging from my own example I can say: it’s been nothing but work, really nothing. I can really say that about me, stark and stiff.” Stralsund as the focal point of socialist conditions of value creation: A ship may be completed every two weeks, but housing, let alone leisure facilities aren’t. The diagnosis: The quality-of-life to performance ratio is less than ideal. The brigade’s team spirit, though, is still strong, even if, as some think, there are some shortcomings on the “ideological side”.

Sibylle Schönemann’s film about abortion lets young and older women speak; women who were forced to abort by their partners or who chose to carry the baby to term despite predicted difficulties. Assembled as a kind of collage, a round table alternates with stylised passages, while the camera also shows moments in a clinic right before and after the procedure. The attitude vacillates between drama and affirmation of life. Liberal perspectives, with one exception, are left out. Schönemann, together with Tamara Trampe, almost managed to take up the complex issue in a feature film.

After studying at the German Academy of Film Art Potsdam-Babelsberg, Karlheinz Mund made this documentary tour of Jewish cemeteries in Berlin. The gravestones preserve the names of famous and unknown people. They preserve their places of death, where no distinction was made between the famous and the unknown: Auschwitz, Mauthausen. When the West German Short Film Festival invited Mund’s film, the committees in charge enforced one distinction after all: The images of graves defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti taken from the West German press were allowed to remain, footage of the same content filmed in East Berlin had to be removed for the theatrical release in the GDR.

Petra looks back on an eventful day: Together with other kids she went on a paperchase, solved a few small tasks and coordinated with her assigned partner. There were some adventures, but also a classroom situation set up in a meadow where one’s knowledge of the local flora was tested. In the end, they all boarded sailing boats and glided off into an atmospheric evening. A protocol in letters, accurately drawn up at the Potsdam Pioneer House, serves as the framework for one of the first completed films of the newly founded German Academy of Film Art in Babelsberg.

The GDR formed an image of its citizens, hardy in everyday life and firm in principles, that it wished to see reflected in “their” art. Dresden-based artist Volker, called Via Lewandowsky, avoided the vanity of the GDR art scene and reflected something else back to his superior state: the indolence of the flesh, the gluttony of the systems that allegedly ordered the world. This Super 8 film from the late German Democratic subculture rubs against Heiner Müller’s stage text “Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome A Shakespeare Commentary”. The manuscript was (half) published in 1986 by the East Berlin Henschelverlag with the following proviso: “If the play is not accepted for production, this book must be returned immediately […].” Lewandowsky emigrated to West Berlin in 1989 before the fall of the Wall.

A wall stands in a barren, inhospitable landscape, insurmountable. While the birds are flying unhindered through the air, a human being struggles in vain to open a door in the wall. First as a small child, then as an adult, finally as an old man. When the door at last unexpectedly gives way, it seems too late. A dark allegory by the Leipzig-based painter and graphic artist Rainer Schade.

History in a hurry: Namibia becomes independent in March 1990, in July the Publicly Owned Enterprise DEFA becomes a GmbH, in October GDR becomes FRG East, in August a West and an East German filmmaker record one of the last GDR inconsistencies for DEFA. The state in pre-retirement sends 425 Namibian children, whom it had rescued from Angolan camps eleven years earlier, “home.” Hastily. But why? When Grote, Kunert and the children arrive, a Namibian minister explains that the East German supporters of these colonial war victims are now out of power. The new powers had no interest … In the Leipzig festival selection in 1990, and again in 1991, this film about German-Namibian foreignness and alienation cannot be found. The Retrospective 2024 makes up for this strange omission.

“Bells ring for victim and perpetrator alike, they ring for the master and the servant, the sounds falling into each other, beginning and end, life and death, sleep and awakening, work and prayer.” Helga Schütz’s lyrical verses are closely interwoven with Dagnija Osite-Krüger’s exploration of bells and their many shapes. Whether melted down as tools of war or warning of danger – “Vivos Voco”, which also teaches us about the craft of bell founding, envelops us in an eery, monumental and epochal way. In her auto-fictional biography, Schütz writes about the collaboration with Osite-Krüger: “The two of us and the film, we were a team, we and the co-determinant images.”

Rolling into the village: Circus Hein. Angelika Andrees is interested in the individual acts presented in the ring, but even more in what happens before and afterwards. Or what the audience look like from below, when various bottoms are squashed on the wooden benches. Sometimes there’s clacking and knocking, or the pattering of rain, and in the end, Bob Dylan sings. “Travelling Circus” was made when Andrees was still at the Babelsberg Film Academy. She experiments with different elements, switches tones and thus captures the moods crystallising around the travelling attraction. A portrait emerges, without commentary and with very few, short interview sequences.

“Everyone says fat people eat too much. But it’s not that simple”, Christiane Hein states at the beginning of her film which follows seven-year-old Robert Becher from Erfurt in his struggle against excess pounds. The stages include a dieting sanatorium complete with “juice day”, humiliating physical education lessons at school and a visit to relatives in the country where Robert experiences a life without teasing and self-punishment. This is where the boy lets go – not easy when thoughts of weight fence one’s life in. Again and again, director Hein inserts scales as a symbolic image reminiscent of a guillotine-like torture instrument. A compassionate portrait.

A handful of quarrymen in the Reinhardtsdorf open cast mine near Bad Schandau dig out the coveted Elbe natural stone. Gabriele Denecke’s approach to the men, who are of different ages, is almost trance-like, the movement to and from the stones marks the transition to another world. We hear about the merciless working conditions of the past, about alcohol, people worn out before their time. Today, digging out the massive rocks in the midst of nature also constitutes a degree of freedom. Open cast miners share a special mindset. And: Once you’ve worn out your first pair of wooden shoes, you’ll stay – probably forever.

Coal briquets hit the waggon with a thundering sound, are loaded, unloaded and finally end up in the houses of Prenzlauer Berg. Renate Uhle is the owner of a coal shop run by her family since 1922. Together with her men – Klaus, Kalle, Manne, Erwin, Pummel, Felix and Würstchen – she sees to it that no one in the neighbourhood freezes. Work is hard, the afterwork beer obligatory, and Renate’s tongue quick and sensitive. Helke Misselwitz follows the workers on their chugging diesel-driven ants through the streets and the watershed year of 1989, sweats with them as they climb up endless stairs and listens to them through the cigarette smoke.