“So now we’re gonna play a game. – Is it a game? – It depends on how you look at it …” Two lovers in a secluded holiday home. Over a summer dinner, Line and Rosie discuss issues of power and the representation of women and female sexuality on film. A game in front of and behind the camera begins, in the course of which they change roles more and more seamlessly. Who creates which level of reality and who bears responsibility for how a scene is perceived?

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

German philosopher Walter Benjamin and British filmmaker Humphrey Jennings are sitting on a cloud and talking. About what? About the so-called “small” 1937 World Fair in Paris, where the two might have met? Or about the recently rediscovered 9.5mm film Jennings is said to have shot there? Or about their great unfinished projects? Benjamin’s “Arcades Project” and Jennings’s “Pandæmonium” show a striking structural similarity: Benjamin’s goal was to compile a history of the 19th century from contemporary sources and quotes. Jennings chose the same approach in his attempt to document “the coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers”, to quote the subtitle of his posthumously published book on industrialisation.

Together they watch the 1937 film in slow motion. Their conversations are recorded and commented by an anonymous female scribe: the views of two thinkers and poets on modernity, surrealism, new technologies, capitalism as a spectacle or the diverging positions on the British Isles and the European mainland.

Frederik Lang

Left-hand, right-hand, cross traffic in the industrial city of Rawalpindi. “It wouldn’t work if I left the house thinking that I am a woman,” says Zahida. But this works: to be a woman, mother, Pakistani, even the whole of Pakistan. She already is a woman taxi driver, the only one in the country – queen of the asphalt and bumpy tracks. She wears a headscarf and the proverbial breeches and she has a strong, soft, rough, gentle nature that shines in all its facets in this film.

Sylvia Görke