D
Film Archive
About Killing the Pig
Animated Film
Italy
2011
6 minutes
subtitles:
English
A mother-son relationship, subtly and poetically depicted in fluid images. Man and woman, human and animal.
Appunti del passaggio
Maria Iorio, Raphaël Cuomo
Immigrant workers in 1965: from contemporary witness reports emerges the narrative of an Italian woman who becomes an “outlaw working body” in Switzerland. Poetic fragment of a humiliation.
Appunti del passaggio
Documentary Film
Belgium,
Italy,
Switzerland
2016
44 minutes
subtitles:
English
“I have no visual memory. I remember emotions.” In their remarkably artistically dense documentary Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo combine various statements of contemporary witnesses into the personal report of an Italian who entered Switzerland in 1965 as a migrant labourer. At the core of this representative of many economic refugees from Southern Europe of the time lies the feeling that she is an “outlaw working body”. She feels humiliated and controlled by procedures at the “border health check”, by massive underpay, dangerous working conditions, psychological pressure in the factory and openly expressed, wounding resentment against the foreigners.
The film is a collage of memories given a voice by a female narrator and kept deliberately vague on the visual level. Vague, but extremely effective and openly sceptical about the reality promised by visual evidence. Besides distorted details and negatives of a few surviving photos it’s the restful contemporary video recordings, for example of an abandoned building with all the traces of use, which offer a suitable poetic space to the narrator’s audio report and a voice performance.
André Eckardt
The film is a collage of memories given a voice by a female narrator and kept deliberately vague on the visual level. Vague, but extremely effective and openly sceptical about the reality promised by visual evidence. Besides distorted details and negatives of a few surviving photos it’s the restful contemporary video recordings, for example of an abandoned building with all the traces of use, which offer a suitable poetic space to the narrator’s audio report and a voice performance.
André Eckardt
Caterpillar and Hen
Michela Donini, Katya Rinaldi
The hen and the caterpillar are the best friends in the world. And yet they must say goodbye to each other. Fortunately not forever …
Caterpillar and Hen
The hen and the caterpillar are the best friends in the world. And yet they must say goodbye to each other. Fortunately not forever …
Craboom
Animated Film
Italy
2012
12 minutes
subtitles:
No
Craboom is the onomatopoeic sound of a strong explosion. An animatio where daily life elements turn into imagery symbols. In a paper world populated by two-dimensional characters, the interference of a disruptive vision breaks the “inexorable running” of a clock, blasting the harmony of a normal family life into small lonelinesses.
Das Venedig Prinzip
Andreas Pichler
About the last residents of a Venice reduced to a Disneyland for cruise ship tourists. Scary images of a city turned capitalist nightmare.
Das Venedig Prinzip
Documentary Film
Germany,
Italy,
Austria
2012
80 minutes
subtitles:
German
It’s hard to find a more popular city than Venice. But what is a dream for many people has become a nightmare for the residents. This film shows cruise ships and coaches spilling their loads of tourists at the banks of the old town, from which they flood squares, bridges and alleys. The tourists may bring money – especially for the big corporations -, but they are also the curse of this city.
This film follows a few residents, perhaps the last of their kind, through their Venice. They show an infrastructure on the verge of collapse. Food stores are rare; schools and post offices have closed, replaced by ever more hotels and piers for huge cruise ships. “What can you do?” a Venetian woman asks resignedly. “Sell glassware and souvenirs?” She too rents out her house to pay for its refurbishment. Another born Venetian is forced to move to the mainland because he can’t afford the rent. Only foreigners and rich Italians can pay the expensive prices per square meter, an embittered real estate agent concludes. Only 60000 residents still live in the historic city centre today. The same number of people visit the city every day. Venice is degenerating into an open air museum. The film takes a sobering look behind the picture postcard idylls of Doge’s Palace, Rialto Bridge and the pigeons of St. Mark’s Square.
– Antje Stamer
This film follows a few residents, perhaps the last of their kind, through their Venice. They show an infrastructure on the verge of collapse. Food stores are rare; schools and post offices have closed, replaced by ever more hotels and piers for huge cruise ships. “What can you do?” a Venetian woman asks resignedly. “Sell glassware and souvenirs?” She too rents out her house to pay for its refurbishment. Another born Venetian is forced to move to the mainland because he can’t afford the rent. Only foreigners and rich Italians can pay the expensive prices per square meter, an embittered real estate agent concludes. Only 60000 residents still live in the historic city centre today. The same number of people visit the city every day. Venice is degenerating into an open air museum. The film takes a sobering look behind the picture postcard idylls of Doge’s Palace, Rialto Bridge and the pigeons of St. Mark’s Square.
– Antje Stamer
Denoise
Giorgio Ferrero, Federico Biasin
A Texas oil field, the engine room of an ocean freighter, an anechoic room, a waste incineration plant.
Denoise
A Texas oil field, the engine room of an ocean freighter, an anechoic room, a waste incineration plant – contrasting sceneries that are connected by the protagonists of this 360° collage film. They lead lonely lives, far removed from our own lifestyle. The quiet of the free field chamber clashes with the roaring of the engine room, but ultimately it’s all one.
Lars Rummel, Marie Hinkelmann
Lars Rummel, Marie Hinkelmann
Die fünfte Himmelsrichtung
Martin Prinoth
A family film about the search for one’s biological mother, for roots, one’s identity. The trail leads to the Dolomite Alps, Brazil and even the bottom of the ocean.
Die fünfte Himmelsrichtung
Documentary Film
Germany,
Italy
2017
78 minutes
subtitles:
English
The drama is reflected in geological dimensions, in primeval depths. Where does mankind’s desire to learn how the world was created come from? Where do we come from? There is stardust, the primary matter, the answer to the question, in the rocks at the bottom of the ocean. The origin of all life can be studied, but not necessarily the origin of an individual life.
Martin Prinoth took his film to the bottom of the sea – where the primary stone is found. And where his cousin Georg’s body sank when he was killed in a plane crash over the Atlantic in 2009. Georg was adopted, like his brother Markus. They were born in Brazil and moved into a village in the Dolomites when they were small children, with no knowledge of their origin and who were or are their biological mothers. “The Fifth Point of the Compass” goes on an exceptionally sensitive and attentive quest for the roots and identities of its protagonists – from South Tyrol to Brazilia and finally to the bottom of the ocean.
Lukas Stern
Nominated for Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize
Martin Prinoth took his film to the bottom of the sea – where the primary stone is found. And where his cousin Georg’s body sank when he was killed in a plane crash over the Atlantic in 2009. Georg was adopted, like his brother Markus. They were born in Brazil and moved into a village in the Dolomites when they were small children, with no knowledge of their origin and who were or are their biological mothers. “The Fifth Point of the Compass” goes on an exceptionally sensitive and attentive quest for the roots and identities of its protagonists – from South Tyrol to Brazilia and finally to the bottom of the ocean.
Lukas Stern
Nominated for Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize
Emigration 68
Luigi Perelli
Migrant labourers tell their stories: of being a “guest” in Belgium, France and the FRG, of experiences of loss that became an aphorism: It’s German in coldland.
Credits
Luigi Perelli
Franco Potenza
Alberto Marrama
Raimondo Crociani
Dacia Maraini
Migrant labourers tell their stories: of being a “guest” in Belgium, France and the FRG, of experiences of loss that became an aphorism: It’s German in coldland.
Ralph Eue
Ralph Eue
Exemplary Behaviour
Audrius Mickevičius, Nerijus Milerius
How do murderers atone for their acts? Is there actually anything like atonement for an irreparable crime like murder? A film about time and finality, change and forgiveness.
Exemplary Behaviour
Documentary Film
Bulgaria,
Italy,
Lithuania,
Slovenia
2019
85 minutes
subtitles:
English
Credits
Rasa Miškinytė, Martichka Bozhilova, Igor Pediček, Edoardo Fracchia
Audrius Mickevičius, Nerijus Milerius
Marjan Šijanec
Audrius Kemezys, Valdas Jarutis, Julius Žalnierukynas, Audrius Mickevičius
Ema Konstantinova, Armas Rudaitis
Rimas Sakalauskas
Audrius Mickevičius, Georgi Tenev
Saulius Urbanavičius
Audrius Mickevičius puts the horribly disfigured face of his murdered brother at the start of his film. He’s interested in the question of how someone atones for such an act. With regard to this particular crime one could say: far too short, because the murderer is released after only five years on the grounds that he proved himself to be an exemplary prisoner. Mickevičius doesn’t confine himself to this individual case, though, but raises his film to a more general level: “Exemplary Behaviour” is almost a meditation about the question whether a final act like murder can be atoned for in a temporal order – and whether the passing of time allows the victim’s family to forgive.
Mickevičius uses the example of two lifers (one of them gets married and wants to have children, the other pours his whole passion into an idea of craftsmanship) and a philosopher with prison experience (Bernhard Stiegler) to make that strange state of suspended life comprehensible. The elegiac undertone is finally reinforced by the information that Audrius Mickevičius fell ill and died during the production of “Exemplary Behaviour”. The film was completed by Nerijus Milerius.
Bert Rebhandl
Awarded with a Golden Dove in the International Competition Long Film, with the Prize of the Interreligious Jury and with the FIPRESCI Prize.
Mickevičius uses the example of two lifers (one of them gets married and wants to have children, the other pours his whole passion into an idea of craftsmanship) and a philosopher with prison experience (Bernhard Stiegler) to make that strange state of suspended life comprehensible. The elegiac undertone is finally reinforced by the information that Audrius Mickevičius fell ill and died during the production of “Exemplary Behaviour”. The film was completed by Nerijus Milerius.
Bert Rebhandl
Awarded with a Golden Dove in the International Competition Long Film, with the Prize of the Interreligious Jury and with the FIPRESCI Prize.
Flood
Animated Film
Italy
2012
5 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
A girl at the window watches the passing of time, the waltz of seasons, waiting for her man. A colourful and poetic metamorphosis.
Fragment 53
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, Federico Lodoli
Former warlords talk about their actions in the Liberian civil war. Extremely intense, meticulously researched and formally austere study of violence and brutality.
Fragment 53
Documentary Film
Italy,
Switzerland
2015
71 minutes
subtitles:
English
Credits
Tommaso Bertani, Federica Schiavo
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, Federico Lodoli
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, Federico Lodoli
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, Federico Lodoli
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, Federico Lodoli
Extremly condensed, meticulously researched and journalistic study of Liberia’s recent history. Seven former warlords of different ranks talk in interviews about cruelties they committed on their own or following orders during the first Liberian civil war in the early 1990s. Memories of brutal orgies of violence are recited with almost bureaucratic precision, interrupted only by precisely framed shots of the beautiful landscape in which – as we gradually realise – the now invisible horror took place.
Lina Dinkla
Lina Dinkla
Frosted Chocolate Mouse
Animated Film
Italy
2011
3 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
Not only the worldnever stops but also the stream of consciousness. A dreamlike and surreal vision in which the same elements swirl around, running after themselves in an infinite sequence.
Funeralopolis. A Suburban Portrait
Alessandro Redaelli
Two young men in a town near Milan who challenge life itself, love and death. They risk themselves because everything else seems even riskier.
Funeralopolis. A Suburban Portrait
Losing senses is often the path to finding meaning. Drug paraphernalia in the tiny dirty train toilet. Cut. A belt around a thin upper arm. Fade to black. A needle hanging from a vein. Fade to black. A trickle of blood on the arm. Can you use the water here to wash yourself? Better not. We meet Vash and Felce between Bresso, Sesto San Giovanni and Milan. Vash is younger than Felce, cheerful, with his hair in something that makes him look “like a mushroom”. Felce used to study architecture. They make music, party and take drugs.
Alessandro Redaelli used to shoot juice commercials featuring colourfully dressed and laughing young people. But in this film there are no colours. Some laughing though – and crying. Everything races past and we don’t know where. This “suburban portrait” deals with vanities and fashion, provocation and the right timing. Redaelli insists that his film is not about heroin and definitely not an educational film about the consequences of addiction. To him it’s a film about two friends looking for a meaning in life.
Carolin Weidner
Alessandro Redaelli used to shoot juice commercials featuring colourfully dressed and laughing young people. But in this film there are no colours. Some laughing though – and crying. Everything races past and we don’t know where. This “suburban portrait” deals with vanities and fashion, provocation and the right timing. Redaelli insists that his film is not about heroin and definitely not an educational film about the consequences of addiction. To him it’s a film about two friends looking for a meaning in life.
Carolin Weidner
Haircut
Virginia Mori
A pupil and a teacher, alone in a bare classroom. On the surface this is about the girl’s hairdo. But what exactly is it that unfolds around the long pigtail: a power game, a showdown, or just a fantasy?
Haircut
Animated Film
France,
Italy
2014
8 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
A pupil and a teacher, alone in a bare classroom. On the surface this is about the girl’s hairdo. But what exactly is it that unfolds around the long pigtail: a power game, a showdown, or just a fantasy? Virginia Mori spent a year drawing with pencil and ballpoint pen on paper. Her 3,000 drawings, set to Andrea Martignoni’s music, are condensed into a melancholy and dreamlike chamber play about power and submission.
Nadja Rademacher
Nadja Rademacher
I Had a Dream
Claudia Tosi
A long term observation of the last political decade in Italy: Claudia Tosi and her two protagonists pose the brutal question whether democracy and politics are still alive at all.
I Had a Dream
Documentary Film
France,
Italy
2018
84 minutes
subtitles:
English
This film is flanked by two men: Silvio Berlusconi, who in 2008 became Italian Prime Minister for the fourth time, and Donald Trump, who was sworn in as president of the United States a little less than a decade later. Manuela, a member of the Italian Parliament, and Daniela, a local politician, see this period, marked as it is by men, as the epitome of political regression. Both have spent years fighting for more sexual equality, better laws to protect women from domestic violence and a more diverse body of political decision makers.
Is politics dead? This brutal question guides Claudia Tosi’s long-term observation of the developments of the past decade in Italy. With a loss of 6.7 % of the votes, the democrats were clearly defeated by the populist and Eurosceptic Five Star Movement. Neither Manuela nor Daniela ever thought that democracy, civil solidarity and the desire for progress would one day be challenged to such an extent or that Berlusconism, which they believed was overcome, would have such pervasive after-effects.
Lukas Stern
Awarded with a Golden Dove in the International Competition Long Film, with the Prize of the Interreligious Jury and with the FIPRESCI Prize
Is politics dead? This brutal question guides Claudia Tosi’s long-term observation of the developments of the past decade in Italy. With a loss of 6.7 % of the votes, the democrats were clearly defeated by the populist and Eurosceptic Five Star Movement. Neither Manuela nor Daniela ever thought that democracy, civil solidarity and the desire for progress would one day be challenged to such an extent or that Berlusconism, which they believed was overcome, would have such pervasive after-effects.
Lukas Stern
Awarded with a Golden Dove in the International Competition Long Film, with the Prize of the Interreligious Jury and with the FIPRESCI Prize
Im Märkischen Sand
Credits
Nina Mair, Matthias Neumann
Nina Mair, Matthias Neumann, Katalin Ambrus
Andrea Blasetig, Stefano Fornasaro
Matthias Neumann
Lucian Busse
Cosimo Miorelli
Aurora Kellermann
Romano Casellini
Chris Wilson
Only four survived. The other 127 were dead when the Germans hastily buried their bodies. Antonio Ceseri, one of the four, could hardly breathe under the sand. Sebaldushof near Treuenbrietzen was one of 40,000 labour camps in Nazi Germany. “The Sandmine” is a journey deep into a forgotten part of German-Italian history. In six chapters and 24 episodes the web documentary employs a distinct mixture of animation and documentation to uncover war crimes that seemed long buried under the sand.
Lars Rummel
Lars Rummel
