A PRAYER FOR THE LEFT

Gebet für die Linke was the last short film by Mertens & Marti, which fits well into a series of works that look like they belong together: on the one hand images from Zurich’s Oerlikon district, which houses both immigrant workers and the arms industry. On the other hand, there are the words of the Archbishop of Olinda e Recife and world-famous liberation theologian Dom Hélder Câmara, who after a lecture at the Züspa Hall said a prayer for the Left, at the request of Walter Marti. At the time, the film was an afterword to the Bührle affair – today it is a prime example of religious and political cinema.