Down By The River explores the memorialization of Delfin Guerra and Raúl Garcia Paret. Both came from Cuba to Merseburg as contract workers in 1979 to work at the nearby chemical plants in Leuna. They died two months later following a violent altercation with German patrons at a disco near the Saale River. The cause and circumstances of their death were never fully clarified.
The film juxtaposes images of the town of Merseburg with recorded fragments of text, pairs memories of former contract workers with other voices from Merseburg, and contrasts passages from Stasi files and newspaper articles with street interviews and Facebook comments. This dense collage forms a reflection on memory, repression, and continuities of racism.
Modern palimpsests of the scribblings and scratched stickers found throughout Merseburg, the overgrown ruins of the Saaletal disco now giving way to the encroaching forest, and murky underwater film clips serve as visual metaphors for struggles for collective memorialization, voids in memory, and the reinscription and concealment of racism.