Make Up the World
Trailer
Synopsis
An array of social and professional milieus have grown up at the three prop houses Fundus Studio Babelsberg, Requisitenfundus Delikatessen Berlin and FTA Props in Hamburg. Each depot has a different logic and its own particular community with its own experiences in dealing with things. Susanne, Miu, Andreas and the three Peters are experts in moving, processing, sorting and presenting up to 100,000 different items.
Lamps, cups, sofas, collection tins, flags, toy fish, plastic flowers, clocks, fake oil paintings and other film props blossom in unimaginable variety.
All this stuff changes hands countless times as it migrates from an old-world analogue order to diverse new ones. On the internet, film props mutate into descriptions, photos and search terms. In the outside world of “made-up reality” they emerge as quotes from film and TV productions. Turning the focus onto film props reveals an eccentric history of German film, tracing their appearances in such movies as Kolberg, Großstadtrevier, Welt am Draht, Prüfstand 7, Finsterworld or Sonnenallee, but also in the daily soap opera Verbotene Liebe. In docu-fiction, the props lead BiPOC actor and activist Thelma Buabeng into postcolonial provenance research in the props house and a daily thing-life of African objects.