What happened in the GDR on 17 June 1953? Using a lot of original footage, Norddeutscher Rundfunk looks back on the events in a detailed report marking their 20th anniversary and shows different interpretations and explanations. Agent coup? Workers’ revolt? Popular uprising? The interpretations were controversial, even among contemporary witnesses and Western historians.
The deadliest refugee route in the world claims thousands of lives every year. In the first half of 2023 alone, almost 2,000 people died in the Mediterranean because the European Union’s border policy systematically violates existing laws. Instead of helping shipwrecked persons, Frontex practices illegal pushbacks, finances the violent operations of the Libyan coast guard and takes massive action against private sea rescue missions that act where the EU fails. All this has been documented in the media and yet remains incomprehensible to all who were never forced to live through this situation themselves: How can one deny assistance to hundreds of people in peril of life, even threaten and criminalise the civilian helpers?
Jonathan Schörnig was concerned with this dilemma of lack of perception and decided to bring a sea rescue to the screen as a real time documentary to show how agonisingly long it takes to rescue 104 persons from a sinking rubber boat. One by one, step by step, the film follows the action with several parallel cameras. When the Libyan coast guard turn up, the situation comes to a head. The rescued persons and the crew are stuck on the high seas for days because no Mediterranean country gives them permission to dock. It is only after a heavy storm that one port takes pity on them. What sounds like a bad script is actually – daily – reality.
A camera roams incessantly through an apartment and a life without any particular hallmarks. Sound and animated interventions portray family bliss and unhappiness, quarrels and separation, age and death. Radio news open the window a little to what is going on in the world outside. The constantly changing interiors tell of people who were at home here without ever showing them.
As we watch individual details and their interplay as a whole, presented on rotating discs, we get a spark of insight into the interactions of flora and fauna on earth and the elemental power of our central star, the sun. Temporality, rhythm and the functioning of film are hinted at. A look at the origins of life and the moving image.
Inside a barn the camera catches the daylight filtering into the fragile building through the irregular gaps and crevices in its wooden skin. It chases them with whip pans or ambushes the slowly creeping sunlight with time-lapse shots. The flashing, blazing rays seem like the heartbeat of this chamber of light. There is no outside view.
