MADE IN USA and other films by Christine and Kurt Rosenthal

In recent years, interest in the film work of Christine and Kurt Rosenthal has emerged simultaneously in various locations. This has led to some initial digitization projects, all with the common goal of re-examining the work from a contemporary perspective and making it digitally accessible once again. MADE IN USA (1974) is an experimental non-fiction film about life in Chile before and after the 1973 military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's government. Through the voice of a young working-class man, the film recounts the crucial role played by the US secret service – the CIA – in dismantling the Popular Unity government. A collage of animated photographs, the film was made using an optical printer shipped from Germany to Peru shortly after Kurt and Christine Rosenthal arrived in South America, where they lived for 26 years. MADE IN USA was screened at the 21st Oberhausen Short Film Festival in 1975, where it received the Youth Film Library Award. Despite this award and having two different sound versions – one in Spanish and one in German – supposedly intended for distribution in different territories, the film had very little circulation. This new digital reproduction was created at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola as part of the research project “Second Hand: Reuse and Deviations of Ibero-American Cinema”.
The technique of MADE IN USA continues the style that Kurt had previously developed in films such as STORYBOARD (1970), Maria Martinez Lopez (1971) and Für Deutsche und Ausländische Arbeiter (1973). Through the testimony of a migrant from Cusco, the short film LA PARADA (1974) portrays one of Lima’s main hubs of popular commerce. Amid markets, street vendors, workshops, and the streets of Tacora, the film observes the labor, precarity, and strategies of survival of a migrant population transforming the city while seeking to build a life within it.

Films:

MADE IN USA, Peru, FRG 1974, 47 min., DCP, original version with English subtitles
STORYBOARD, FRG 1970, 9 min., 16mm, no dialogues
LA PARADA, Peru 1974, 10 min., digital file, OmeU, original version with English subtitles

Carolina Cappa is a film archivist, professor, and researcher. She works on the preservation and restoration of Latin American and non-commercial films, collaborating with numerous archives and universities. She is currently Head of Research at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE) in the Basque Country.

Julio César Gonzales Oviedo is a postdoctoral researcher at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), where he leads the project Counter-Visualities of Care: Community Archives, Visual Culture, and Political Ecology in the Andean Páramos. He is a member of the Research-Creation Group in Visual Studies and Moving Images at PUCP and the Seminar on Social, Solidarity and Popular Economy at UNMSM (Peru), working on visual culture, community communication, political organization, and the production of the commons.

Daniel Franz Meiller is a literary scholar, film editor, film restorer, and archivist. He studied Romance Studies and Comparative Literature as well as film editing at the University of Film and Television Babelsberg. From 1995 to 2006, he worked as a freelance editor for documentary and feature films. He subsequently worked as a film restorer at the Nederlands Filmmuseum, where his projects included work on Johan van der Keuken and Dutch experimental film. Since 2008, he has been Head of Audiovisual Collections at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin.

Markus Ruff studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin Visual Communication and Art and Media and at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. He is section head of archival projects at Arsenal Filminstitut, and is responsible for the collection management as well as digitization and restoration projects. Furthermore, he engages in training in the field of film archiving and preservation.

Alexandra Schneider is a professor of film studies at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. Her current research interests include: decentred film historiography, media archaeology and critical media history. She is also a Principal Investigator at the DFG Research Training Group 3064, ‘Technologies of Witnessing’'. Her recent publications include Children Reinventing Cinema. Snapshots from the 21(st) Century, published by Meson Press in 2025 and co-authored with Wanda Strauven.

Marc Siegel is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His current research focuses on anti-Palestinian racism. He is the editor of the bilingual book What’s Underground About Marshmallows? Texts by and about Jack Smith (Alexander Verlag, 2026) and co-editor of Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia (meson press, 2024). He is also a member of the Berlin-based CHEAP art collective and the Association of Palestinian and Jewish Academics in German-speaking countries (PJA).