A village changes its face: In Ödenwaldstetten, Peter Nestler and Kurt Ulrich document the social and economic transformation of the community of the same name in the Swabian Alb in the 1960s. The film, commissioned by Südwestfunk, allows different voices to have their say in an unpolished way. Farmers talk about the structural change in agriculture with the need for mechanization and factory farming. The first guest workers come to work in the village. The school system is changing, although it is still characterized by seasonal child labor during harvest time. The Second World War and the expulsion of the Jewish population are also addressed. However, the new favors forgetting: "What lies behind you is mowed," is said at one point in the film.

Produced by the Gesellschaft für bildende Filme (GBF), the BASF film Um Jahrmillionen voraus (Millions of Years Ahead) received numerous awards for its impressive images of insect biology, was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary Short Film category in 1976 and was used in school lessons for decades. "In South America, the leaf-cutting ant is a feared pest that defoliates trees, cuts fruit and leaves into pieces and then carries them into underground burrows to cultivate a fungus. Today, research is concentrating on mushroom gardens. Millions of years ago, nature had already taken a path that our modern agriculture is now also forced to follow, the path to monoculture." (from a fact sheet on Um Jahrmillionen voraus)

About 20 kilometers south-east of Jüterbog lies the hamlet of Bärwalde. This is where Gautam Bora, an international student at the Babelsberg Film and Television Academy (HFF) in the early 1980s, shot his film about the three generations of the Balke farming family. The family members reflect on their work in the LPG and the unequal gender relations in everyday village life. The attention that Bora and his cameraman Marwan Salamah pay to inconspicuous details lends Ein Herbst im Ländchen Bärwalde (An autumn in the Bärwalde countryside) a subtle poetic quality. Hands, tools and crops can be seen again and again - images that tell of life in Bärwalde just as impressively as the interviews that accompany them and which Bora comments on by making comparisons with his home country of India.

Ein Herbst im Ländchen Bärwalde: Diploma film / Director: Gautam Bora. - Potsdam: Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR, 1983.
Digitization and restoration by the Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, supported by the Förderprogramm Filmerbe, financed by BKM, Länder and FFA.
2023 / 2024 digitized and restored in 4K resolution at PHAROS - The Post Group on behalf of the Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF.
The project was made possible by the Förderprogramm Filmerbe, financed by the Beauftragte für Kultur und Medien der Bundesregierung, the federal states and the Filmförderungsanstalt.

“The better the life of the soil, the more productive it is.” How bacteria, nematodes, and fungus work together to form humus, is rendered visible in Tiere des Bodens (Animals of the Soil), through the use of microscopic images and experimental scenarios. In addition, the film, made for GDR television, gives practical advice on the care of well aerated soil, and thus the maintenance of fertility. In 1959, Siegfried Bergmann began his thirty-year long career in the biology-film division of DEFA. He worked closely together with his wife Christine, who took over the dramaturgy for many of the films. The Bergmanns were permanent employees of DEFA, but were frequently contracted by television. This may perhaps be the reason why films could be made that were comparatively critical of the long suppressed themes of ecology and environment in the GDR.

"Futures" are contracts traded on the commodity futures exchange that specify the future purchase or sale of tangible goods, such as precious metals or agricultural products, at a price agreed today. In theory, Futures serve as a hedge against fluctuating commodity prices. In practice, however, they are bets on the future. With the deregulation of the financial markets and the introduction of electronic trading, hedging has become a mass product. As if by an invisible hand, Futures determine the prices of basic foodstuffs and reinforce the industrial standardization of agriculture worldwide. Fictions and Futures #1 sheds light on the complex and problematic relationship between stock market speculation, food production and bioengineering.

The Andalusian province of Almería is home to the world's largest concentration of greenhouses. Tens of thousands of migrant workers, many of them from North Africa and Eastern Europe, ensure that the fresh produce shelves are full, especially in Germany: Germany imports a third of its produce from Almería. Officially, the workers receive the statutory minimum wage for 40 hours of work per week. But the reality is different. Frutos de Resistencia describes the everyday experience of exclusion and exploitation as well as the solidarity-based struggle for basic rights in industrial agriculture. The film, produced by the Interbrigadas, was made against the backdrop of many years of cooperation with the trade unions Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores (SAT) and Sindicato de Obreros del Campo (SOC).

What waves and signals run through the hybrid landscapes between agricultural use and fallow land? Who passes through the atmosphere—all the way up to outer space? We see remote-controlled machines working the countryside, migratory birds flying over fields, robots imitating human movements. What will the relationship between nature and culture look like in the future? Sandra Schäfer’s most recent film Into the Magnetic Fields questions post-human modes of production. The soundtrack is formed by generated voices that quote feminist science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin, theorist Mark Fisher, artist Lygia Clark, and interviews with foresters and bird researchers, combined with music by Dominik Eulberg, Manuela Schininà, Maya Shenfeld, and Tim Tetzner.

At the end of Yves Allégret's educational film Prix et profits (la pomme de terre) from 1931, a farmer and a worker meet at the outskirts of Paris and shake hands in a close-up lasting several seconds. The image stands for the demand for solidarity between the exploited classes against the capitalist market and pricing system, which creates unequal conditions. The conversion to a sustainable economy cannot avoid the social question. This concerns fair producer prices as well as the question of the affordability of healthy food. Against this backdrop, the short film program Wert der Arbeit, Lohn der Bildung (Value of Work, Wages of Education) takes us on a journey through time from the left-wing progressive reform efforts in France in the 1930s to the global financial industry's current grip on undeveloped land. Barbara Musil visualizes this seemingly invisible and abstract process in market sentiments (2007) using the example of the Estonian land market.
In Ein Bauer und seine Frau, Eduard Schreiber documents the reality of farm work, which the younger generation in the GDR of the early 1980s preferred to life in the city. The couple hopes that their grandchildren will help them keep their farm. Sónia Vaz Borges and Filipa César recall the revolutionary practice of an education that combines physical and intellectual knowledge in Mangrove School, an essay film about the nomadic schools during the war of independence in Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s/70s.

The Solés family has been growing peaches in Alcarràs, a Catalan village not far from Lleida, for 80 years. This summer, they are gathering for the last time to harvest together. The land was once given to them by the landowner Pinyol. But the young Pinyol wants nothing more to do with his grandfather's handshake. He demands the land back in order to build a photovoltaic system on it. As the end of the summer approaches, tensions in the family increase. The Solés almost overlook the fact that they hold a trump card that no one can take away from them.
Carla Simón shot Alcarràs with non-professional actors from the Alcarràs region, who have a strong connection to the land and soil and speak the region's special dialect. Simón herself comes from there, and her family also lives from fruit growing. Alcarràs tells of the Solés' last harvest in a uniquely polyphonic way, orchestrated with exuberant energy and moments of silence. In his review in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Philipp Stadelmaier compares the film, which was awarded the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlinale, with other famous summer films that measure the transience of time, discuss brutal changes in the outside world and deal with questions of heritage and tradition. "In Alcarràs, on the other hand, there is only the collective creation of memories for the time when the world of peaches will no longer exist."

The short film program Vom Bauernhemd zum Blauzeug with two documentaries and an excerpt from a GDR television programme looks at the development of East German agriculture over a period of 20 years. In the discussion forum broadcast at agra 74, the industrial organization of farming activities is cited as a prerequisite not only for making optimum use of modern technology, but also for being able to offer a regular working day. Due to the separation of animal and crop production in the GDR, the implementation of the shift system in agriculture posed major challenges, especially for families whose members worked in both areas. After reunification, the dissolution of the LPGs changed the economic prospects of the rural population at a stroke, as Volker Koepp's Ein Landfilm from 1993 illustrates. "There are richer and poorer people again," comments Koepp on the difference it makes to be able to rebuild your own farm, even if it is debt-financed, or not. Henrike Meyer takes a very personal look at her father's asparagus farm in Treuenbrietzen in the district of Potsdam-Mittelmark in her film Feldarbeit (2012). The Berlin-based filmmaker's desire to spend time with her father and meet him in a new way is in strong competition with the daily harvesting routine, which has long since only been possible with the help of Eastern European seasonal workers.

Followed by an Q&A with Henrike Meyer, moderated by Daniel Herrmann.