Exclusive Films
created by our Speakers
Thomas Heise
HEIMAT IST EIN RAUM AUS ZEIT (Home is a Space of Time), Documentary, 219 min. (2019), Germany/Austria, distributed by GMfilms, Berlin
Synopsis:
Using letters and documents, Thomas Heise examines his own family history over four generations in this monumental work. Language and images combined to create a haunting portrait of a family, a country and a century.
OV German
OV Engl. ST
Thomas Heise
EISENZEIT, Documentary, 87 min. (1991), Germany, distributed by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Berlin
Synopsis:
„Eisenzeit“ nimmt ein Projekt von Anfang der 1980er Jahre wieder auf, das aus politischen Gründen damals nicht realisiert werden konnte: Der Film über vier Jugendliche im Jahrzent vor der Wende, ihre Schwierigkeiten mit dem Staat, der Gesellschaft und ihren Familien, überzeugt durch starke Protagonisten, ein nüchternes aber anteilnehmendes Voice-Over des Regisseurs und die präzise, wohlkomponierte Inszenierung der Schauplätze. Ein desillusionierter Blick auf unerfüllte Utopien und zebrochene Lebensentwürfe – gerade in HInblick auf die „untergegangene“ DDR.
OV German
Lola Arias
TEATRO DE GUERRA (Theatre of War), Film, 78 min. (2018), Argentina/Spain/Germany, distributed by Gema Films, Buenos Aires
Synopsis:
THEATRE OF WAR is a delirious essay on how to represent war, performed by former enemies. British and Argentinian veterans of the Falklands war come together to discuss, rehearse and re-enact their memories 35 years after the conflict.
OV Engl. ST
Kersti Grunditz Brennan
and Annika Boholm
BLOD (Blood), 90 min. (2020), Sweden
Synopsis:
The filmmakers Annika & Kersti make a movie about bloody trails through womanhood. When the bizarre bleeding of one of them turns out to be cancer, they find themselves at the center of their film. What started as a playful attempt to get back to the joy of creating, becomes a story of life and death. Propelled by wild conversations broken up by scenes from the movie they are making.
OV Engl. ST
Laura von Niederhäusern
FILMIC RESEARCH JOURNAL (Film-in-Progress), 53 min. (2021), Switzerland
Synopsis:
The Filmic Research Journal started as a reflective and experimental tool. Over three years of empiric investigation it evolved into a filmic essay in a two channel version. To inquire asynchronic experiences, the researcher followed (with and without a camera) different life situations, where the subjective perception of time would potentially not correspond to chrononormative time concepts of an achievement-oriented society.
OV Engl. ST
Ella Raidel
DOUBLE HAPPINESS, Documentary Film, 75 min. (2014), Austria/China, distributed by Sixpackfilm Vienna
Synopsis:
DOUBLE HAPPINESS takes the Chinese copy of Hallstatt, a small idyllic town in Austria, as the starting point to explore China’s fast urbanization. Chinese cities are built where histories and memories can be easily forgotten and thus rewritten. The film intersects the real and the fake through visual imagery and commentary, interviews and songs.
OV Engl. ST
Arturo Delgado Pereira
EL INVIERNO EL PABLO (Pablo’s Winter), 76 min. (2012), Spain
Synopsis:
Pablo needs to stop smoking. Why? Because his wife, family and doctor say he should. But Pablo is a stubborn man. He has worked in the mercury mines of Almadén, Spain, risking his life daily. He has had five severe heart attacks and smoked 20 Winston cigarettes a day since he was 12. Now in his seventies, Pablo spends most of his day in front of the TV, surrounded by a cloud of smoke, with his back turned firmly towards a village that has lived through better times.
OV Engl. ST
Patrick Wallochny
KREUZUNGEN (Crossings), 15 min. (2017), Germany
Synopsis:
The plenary hall. Place of debate. Where paths and discussions cross. You get together, move away. Match and drift apart. Movement in the conversation room.
Filmed in the former board building of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, which has now been vacant for several years, the work takes the conference architecture as a starting point for dealing with speaking on panel discussions and conferences. The characters try to free themselves from the rigid and immovable form of the installation, but ultimately remain prisoners of the mechanics of conversation.
OV Engl. ST
Verena Buttmann
DER AUFTRITT (On Stage), 22 min. (2018), Germany
Synopsis:
The cinematic narrative follows two people through a small private apartment and along a dialogue in which everyday life, forced confessions of love and intimacy express themselves on a daily basis. In this conversation, however, communicative patterns are constantly disrupted and taken to the edge of meaning where language unfolds its poetic quality.
OV Engl. ST
Rachel Rose
A MINUTE AGO, 10:25 min. (2014), USA
Synopsis:
A Minute Ago begins with a hailstorm smashing suddenly onto a quiet beach in Siberia. Set to a recording of Pink Floyd playing in Pompeii’s empty amphitheater — a concert to the dead within a ruin — half-naked beach-goers roll by seeking shelter under towels and umbrellas. The next scene replicates an interview filmed ten years ago inside of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Johnson was then in his early 90s. He’s here now as a blip, interrupting the sheen of high-resolution, moving to the rhythm of a Steve Reich piece composed of only taps on wood. The house is surrounded by wood yet contains none. The house is then bombarded with the beach’s hailstorm as the sound reverses into a live concert overtaken with cheers and screams. Under sutured footage of real rainstorms, the house collapses.
Filipa César
QUANTUM CREOLE, 40 min. (2019), Guinean Creole, English, German, French
Synopsis:
Quantum Creole is the result of a collective research exercise and incorporate various moving image formats such as video, 16mm and 3D animation, to explore the dynamics of creolisation, in its historical and biological contexts – including the subversive dimension of linguistic codes and notions of weaving. The punch-card technology, originally designed for textile production, was fundamental for the development of the computer. Its binary code is closer to the principle of weaving than to the act of writing. The weaving of ciphered messages of social and political resistance in textiles or as appropriations of the colonist’s language by the creole are just two aspects of the recent past that help us to, today, think about the new digital economies and their procedures and codes. The digital visualisation of an ultra-liberal free trade zone’s project planned by multinational companies in the Bissagos Islands, returns us, albeit in a new guise, to the violence that arose several centuries ago with the creation of slave trading posts in an area that was then known as the Guinean Rivers of Cape Verde.
OV Engl. ST
Filipa César
SPELL REEL, 96 min., Documentary, Portuguese, Guinean Creole, English
Synopsis:
En 2011, une archive filmique et du matériel audio ré-émergent à Bissau. Filipa César imagine un périple où cette fragile matière du passé opère comme le prisme visionnaire d’un éclat d’obus à travers lequel nous regardons. Numérisée à Berlin et projetée dans différents contextes – dans ce qui pourrait ressembler à un cinéma itinérant transnational – l’archive provoque débats, récits et prémonitions. Des villages les plus isolés de Guinée-Bissau aux capitales européennes, ces archives silencieuses deviennent un lieu à partir duquel chercher un antidote à la crise mondiale.
OV French. ST
Filipa César
MINED SOIL, 34 min. (2014), Documentary, Portuguese, English
Synopsis:
The film-essay Mined Soil revisits the work of the Guinean agronomist Amílcar Cabral, studying in the 50’s the erosion of soil in the Portuguese Alentejo region through to his engagement as one of the leaders of the African Liberation Movement. This line of thoughts intertwines a documentation on an experimental gold mining site, operated today by a Canadian company and located in the same Portuguese area once studied by Cabral. The reading of the essay explores the space, surfaces and textures of the images, proposing past and present definitions of soil as a repository of memory, trace, exploitation, crisis, arsenal, treasure and palimpsest.
OV French. ST
Partners
Host
