Intercambio
1982 · 9m · Alemania
Directed by Egon Bunne
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A peculiar documentary about activism on the western side of the Berlin Wall at Mariannenplatz in Kreuzberg, at the height of punk Berlin and the German new wave.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1982 doc-essay hybrid about squatter politics and punk aesthetics in Kreuzberg that refuses the obvious beat-by-beat narrative—it's more interested in the texture of dissent than selling you on a message, which means most people will find it aggressively boring and Felix will bookmark it immediately.
Bunne positions this work squarely in the lineage of Harun Farocki and the German experimental documentary tradition, where form and politics are inseparable; the 9-minute constraint becomes a curatorial choice that prizes montage and tonal precision over conventional activism rhetoric.
The decision to shoot in grainy, high-contrast stock and layer it with ambient sound rather than talking heads transforms what could be static archival material into something visceral and present—one formal choice that does the entire political and emotional work.