We all know photos with painted-over or cut-out faces. The repeatedly inserted hand that works on family pictures with pens and other utensils seems like a refrain. The attempts at eradication are audible. They are a dissonance transferred to the body. Scratch, distort, remove. Usually a woman’s head.
In autumn 1989, many Leipzig citizens lost patience with the GDR. Within weeks, they brought down a forty-year-old state apparatus resistant to change by rallies. Now their patience is tested again: In 2008, the German Bundestag promised the “City of Heroes” of the Peaceful Revolution a monument. Planning has been going on and on … Leipzig bears the waiting with equanimity; after all, it was not idle in the meantime. Right after reunification, the citizenry took charge of its culture of remembrance with such vigour that the monuments are piling up today. Looking up to the crown of the palm tree of the Nikolai Column, one had better take care not to step on a commemorative plaque, fall into a commemorative fountain or bump into a commemorative bell.
The world stands still. Gaudily painted cruise ships lie in the oil port of Augusta on the south-east coast of Sicily. Their lustre fades a little more every day. On the scorched, tinged 16mm film stock they seem as unfit for the future as the refineries visible behind them. When, if not in the early summer of 2021, would the time have ever been riper for reflection and reassessment?! Old, exploitative economic systems that keep people away from Europe and let only raw materials enter are in lockdown. Their future is unimaginable. But is there a way back? To the gentle sound of the waves, the birds and the insects, the smoke of the industrial plants wafts back into the chimneys. But the images have been damaged.
The camera calmly explores the holes and fissures of a cliff face, the traces of the ocean. The austere landscape seems to have fallen out of time. Only a few decades ago, fishermen threw their trap baskets into the water from here. Today, the sea around Malta has long been fished dry. Punta, a moustachioed islander, wants to have one more go.
We have probably all thought about the influence of digital logic and algorithms on our perception of the world at some point. This equally humorous and profound short film takes the interactive online tour service “Google Street View” as a starting point for an investigation of where the reality mapped by fifteen automatic cameras and the one perceived by human senses drift apart – and what the consequences are.
“You got to try to live your own life,” Arzu, one of the football players from the Turkish-Kreuzberg girls’ team Ağrı Spor, demanded in a 1995 film by Aysun Bademsoy. Today she is in her late forties and leads her own life, like her former teammates Türkan, Nalan and Nazan. Bademsoy visited the four of them for the fourth time, following their lives, recalling their visions for the future from back then. And this time she also talked to their daughters, some of whom on the brink of adulthood, who also think about adaptation, tradition, religion and culture. Little has changed between then and now, being German remains a difficult question to answer for every generation.
Unexpectedly, Marion Guillard captures the perfect shot: A flock of birds pirouette in the evening sky, the camera follows their graceful movements as if hypnotized, symbiotically. The road to this moment was long. Guillard shares her journey to the USA with us, which is not only marked by feelings of alienation from her family – the postcard motifs spread before her eyes also leave her cold. In a voiceover, she talks about her relationship to herself and her body, about an ideal of femininity she does not conform to, and disturbing encounters with men.
In three chapters, this film takes us through the Nigerian megacity of Lagos and explores its fluid side. The tour begins with boatman Osan, constantly moving, balancing on his waterway. In split screens we see the human body as a vessel containing water. Then we are chauffeured through the flowing traffic to the Lagos market and finally perform a water dance above the rooftops of the city. Interspersed are mobile phone videos of a young man on Tarkwa Bay Beach: The waves are good, the sun is shining. May the water bless us!
The powerful interventions of the Indonesian artist, cultural studies scholar and filmmaker Timoteus Anggawan Kusno are internationally renowned. What distinguishes them are the empowering attitude and the breathtaking aesthetics he employs to re-interpret in different media the cultural traditions passed on in his homeland. With “Afterlives”, he delivers another unequivocal reckoning with the representations of history shaped by colonial annexation.
Paths can lead us home, but we also run along them into the distance. Have you ever really looked at them? Maybe then we wouldn’t be so afraid of change and loneliness. The film is an epitaph for a memory that is constantly being born and dying, and of which we are an inseparable part.
Every time a Ukrainian student returns from a study stay in Europe, she encounters misunderstandings with the older generation due to different perspectives on life. This film captures a conversation between her grandfather and his best friend during their regular tea meetings.
The film tells the story of Marie, who collects flowers from defunct Sudeten German settlements, abandoned after World War II, and grows them in her garden. In this way, she tries to revive the memory of their ancestors, hidden in human stories and the surrounding nature.
An unreproducible space-time allows for a conversation we tried to pretend doesn’t exist. Two years later, we travel from the pond called Murder over the Hill to Paradise Pond. Why are we talking about this only now? This intimate film about a mother and her daughter is both unique and universal.
When hitchhiking, you never know what’s going to happen. You just stand there with a sign, a clear goal and wait for opportunities – or cars – to pull up. Maybe they’ll give you a short lift or take you somewhere completely different – and that’s all good. I wish I could see that in my normal life.
This film captures my last day at Labyrinth Lhota Elementary Montessori School. Classmates and guides share their opinions on the benefits of this kind of teaching approach, including an insight into the daily hustle and bustle of alternative education.
Not Motherhood is a personal introspection and a reflection of the author’s reality. Thoughts, dreams, feelings and poetic perception are confronted with a fast-paced world. It’s a personal rite of passage. You will pass through several doors, some of which have been left unopened.
The film One Day of an E-sports Player captures a single day in the life of an e-sports player who competes in the computer game League of Legends, often shortened to LoL. In an entertaining way, this film shows the challenges the protagonist faces both in the game and in his everyday life.
When my dad became seriously ill, he stopped working and took up fishing. Fish swim in their microcosm, unaware they could become prey. The pond is both a constraint and a contemplative mirror, in which the father-daughter relationship occasionally glimmers. And the observer becomes the observed.
Why are you still living with your parents? It’s a question I constantly think about. Is it really wrong? My parents are still living with their parents too. And I’m with them. Is it my fault? What’s keeping me here?
"When he’s hungry, thirsty, or crying, I’m here. We’re together 24/7, and I’m everything to him. It’s exhausting. Who can I tell without hearing, "You wanted a child, so take care of it?" And what about my partner? I think I’m having a motherhood crisis." – Lenka Čápová
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