Songs of Hope and Despair

Songs of Hope and Despair is an improvised fairy tale and highly experimental road movie in which a group of strangely costumed, non-professional actors and organic performers—Russian exiles and their friends—set out on an absurd quest for a miracle. Inspired by two key historical works, Werner Tübke’s Panorama of the Peasants’ War and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Niklashausen Journey, the film unfolds in the former mining town of Hettstedt as an unabashedly lo-fi magical game and tragicomic musical. Guided and manipulated by a trickster-magician, and accompanied by the haunting chorus Dark Clouds, its Fish, Dead Drummer, Muse-Leaving-Germany, Fox Tail and other rebel agencies wander through landscapes marked by ecological ruin, failed friendships, and the unease of the present.

Oscillating between enchantment and exposure, mourning and play, the film asks a deceptively simple question: what does a miracle even look like in politically dire times like these? Drawing past and present into a single ritual procession, Songs of Hope and Despair reflects on manipulation and resistance, despair and stubborn hope, insisting—like all true fairy tales—on the fragile persistence of solidarity even when history seems trapped in cycles of defeat.