Veronika Voss, once one of Ufa's greats and rumoured lover of Goebbels, has a chance meeting with #sports journalist Robert Krohn. Despite not recognising her at first glance, the faded star and her world turn out to be irresistible to him.

“What do you want from Voss? She's no good at soccer.”

– Grete

Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss [litt. The yearning of Veronika Voss] is #Fassbinder's tribute to both #BillyWilder's Sunset Blvd. (1950) and real-world actress Sybille Schmitz whose career, like Voss', suffered greatly due to her #morphine dependence after the Entnazifizierung.

Commissioned for a West-German TV series called Kunstgeschichten (litt. both “art stories” and “#art histories”), filmmaker Harun Farocki visits artist Sarah Schumann in her #Berlin studio.

“An diesem Tag war das Bild, drei Monate nach Beginn und 67 Arbeitstagen fertig.”

– narrator

The resulting documentary shows the process of creating one art piece over the course of nine weeks. Schumann's work in that period consists of collage portraits of women important in her life.

Office worker Josef K. is brought to trial and at no point told what he is accused of, if anything. Orson Welles' Le procès is an adaptation of Franz Kafka's unfinished 1914/15 novel Der Prozess. The manuscript, guarded from Kafka by his friend #MaxBrod in an attempt to keep the self-doubting author from destroying his work, was against K's wishes posthumously (re)assembled by Brod without the latter knowing the intended sequence of the loose pages nor what chapters were finished.

“All these fancy electronics, they're all right in their place, but not for anything practical.”

– Uncle Max

The story holds up in its vagueness thanks to the quirks of #Kafka's Brotberuf; Franz K. was a trained lawyer, working as an insurance agent in an impossible artifice world of reports and precise wording. Within its extended logic, a man can get perplexedly lost, either within the walls of his #office or one's bed.

Kidlat, while on Earth, wonders if on the Moon a yoyo behaves any differently. Thanks to his brilliant crew of Bavarian toddlers, his parents' collective aspirations, and generous donations from the First World in the form of assorted junk, he launches the first Filipino space program to find out.

“If you don't eat too many Gummy Bears you could be my co-pilot.”

– Kidlat Tahimik, speaking to a budding crew member

Sinong lumikha ng yoyo? is a remarkable display of imaginative filmmaking. Together with Kidlat we ponder about practicalities, suddenly see connections that were obscured by too much thinking, and realise all the new possibilities we have in life. Part documentary, part animation, part fantasy, part sci-fi, Kidlat transports us to yet unexplored spaces!

Grauzone takes place in one of the three spaces documented in Murer's beautifully titled documentary Wir Bergler in den Bergen sind eigentlich nicht schuld, daß wir da sind [We, the mountain people, who live in the mountains are not really to blame for being there] (1974). One valley lives in tune with its natural rhythm, the second experiences a transition to modernity.

Sie fallen unerwartet in einem traumlosen Schlaf.

The third space, the “grey zone” – both this film's title and a descriptive term for an undefined neutral zone – is where the Bergler have become technology dwellers, where they live on summits made of concrete instead of rock. Where rumours about a #pandemic stir an ancient, unnamed fear. And symptoms: the sudden urge to wander out in nature, an acute melancholy, an overall hyper awareness. A young, prosperous couple become infected and pick up secret radio transmissions. What they believed was concrete, solid, immovable, suddenly shows signs of a shift.

#Herzog travels to New Holland, Pennsylvania to witness the 1976 World Livestock Auctioneer Championship. Cattle is weighed and paraded in front of the buyers, and the 53 contestants have a few minutes to auction the animals off to the highest bidder.

 

We see glimpses of the audience. New Holland is the land of the money-eschewing #Amish, descendants of German-speaking Swiss, whose dress, ways and speech found an ideal state in an increasingly convoluted world. While money rolls, the Amish hand out their home-baked pies free of charge to the Championship onlookers.

 

To German-as-Apfeltorte Herzog, the auction is bewildering, the “last #poetry possible, the poetry of #capitalism”. In keeping with Herzog's poetic, ecstatic truth, Bruno S. too travels to America and encounters the auctioneers in Stroszek (1977).

Good-for-nothing Willi (Charly Wierzejewski) is in trouble. After yet another run-in with the law, and yet again meeting the wrong people at the wrong time, he falls in love with a destitute street worker (Eva Mattes). Now he really needs #money so he can support himself, her, and her kid. He tries his hand at renting himself out to a rich homosexual (homosexuality was illegal in 1970s W Germany), then moves forward to robbing the money transporter of a local supermarket with his pimp buddy. But as usual, Willi is in trouble.

 

Shot on location in #Hamburg's red-light district St. Pauli, Supermarkt is gritty, unpleasant and has an authenticity rarely seen in other films of this genre.

A scandal, that's what it was! In the late 1960s, Peter Fleischmann picked the picturesque Catholic village of #Landshut as the backdrop for Jagdszenen aus #Niederbayern, the film adaptation of Martin Sperr's #TheatrePlay with the same name.

 

A young man named Abram – played by Sperr – returns to his family village. Soon the townspeople's thorns move from the in their eyes other disgraceful villagers to the much-needed mechanic.

“Ich habe ihn halb tot geschlagen, ich schwör's. Ich kann nichts dafür, dass eine Drecksau draus geworden ist.”

Where did he return from? He was in prison. What for? For being a homosexual. He's a Drecksau (a filthy pig), his mother says. The village whore can't turn him around. A sow is slaughtered in real time in celebration of a successful #harvest and plans for the town's future are forged.

 

While created when West Germany's #Paragrafen175 was in place [1872–1994], illegality of same-sex relations], the homosexual aspect wasn't the main cause of the outrage. Some of the Landshutter villagers who played alongside the professional actors felt they were depicted as being backwards. This isn't a movie about hunting, sigted some. Lifting the veil of the prevalence of, a #Fernweh in a sense, that Germany (hush) was another.

 

Catholic Mass is a theatrical re-enactment of the life and suffering of the son of God. When rites outstay their meaning, when invocations turn routine, the worshippers lose sight.

Vérités et Mensonges is what it's actually called, but you may know it as F for Fake. Orson Welles and three uncredited fellow conspirators – Gary Graver, Oja Kodar, and François Reichenbach – delve into the world of #art forger Elmyr de Hory by way of his biographer Clifford Irving.

“Back to the old tricks.”

– Orson Welles

Welles et al free-associate with concepts of art, lies, #deception, and #authenticity. #Houdin, Welles, #Picasso and Hughes, hoaxers, hucksters and artists in their own right. And then it's over: this work of art, this sleight of hand, this demonstration of factuality, an exposé.