A new retrospective at DOK Leipzig is doing something the festival circuit rarely attempts. Rather than simply screening the canon of 1960s and 70s Latin American political cinema, «Cinema and Struggle: Latin America Between East and West» turns its attention to the physical films themselves and to the improbable, divided-city infrastructure that kept them alive.
The programme, spanning seven sections and pairing five features with sixteen shorts made between 1958 and 1985, is built around what curator Florian Wüst calls the search for new connections rather than the obvious ones. It draws on a shared institutional project between the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, the Federal Archives, the DEFA Foundation and DOK Leipzig, and the premise is unusually specific for a retrospective: much of this material survives today in Germany because East Berlin’s State Film Archive and West Berlin’s Friends of the German Cinematheque were, separately and then in effect together, copying, trading and storing prints of films their countries of origin were actively trying to suppress.
The Chilean strand carries particular weight. Patricio Guzmán’s El primer año captures the optimism of Allende’s first year in government, while Sieg und Niederlage premieres a newly restored version of Eine Minute Dunkel macht uns nicht blind, Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann’s 1976 document of Chile two years into Pinochet’s dictatorship. Films by Santiago Álvarez and the collective behind La hora de los hornos round out a selection organised around the aesthetics and urgency of Third Cinema as a movement.
For archivists and programmers, the more durable contribution may be the DOK Talk scheduled for 28 October, where representatives of all four partner institutions will address what this Cold War-era exchange means for digitisation and preservation practice now. It is a rare instance of a retrospective treating its own supply chain, the festivals, the couriers, the rival German archives, as part of the story rather than as background to it.
«Cinema and Struggle: Latin America Between East and West» screens at DOK Leipzig, with an accompanying DOK Talk on 28 October 2026, 15:00–16:30, at the Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig.
