The work of Berlin-based filmmaker and artist Jack Wolf is based primarily on investigative research into conflict and environmental issues as well as migration. He also operates in political and social epicentres using state-of-the-art technology and innovative hardware. In this short film he ties all these strands together succinctly and precisely. “I Don’t Think I’m Alone in This” was shot with a time-of-flight camera, which is used in 3D technology and designed to give machines, in the broadest sense, human perception. So visually everything is about data flow, numbers, and transformation. In terms of content, the fate of a young man who fled from Damascus to Beirut as a child ten years ago becomes palpable.
Speaking from the offscreen of a cramped room that is both safe haven and cage, Amjad Bahloul talks about the past. About how wonderful it was to meet all the people in the street, play football, interact with the real world, a blessing. A blessing in the cursed loneliness of a foreign country, as it turned out for Amjad, were Facebook, YouTube, and the like – his only means of social contact. “This lightens the burden,” he says. And now they could help him and other refugees find their way home, because the Syrian regime has fallen. He learned about it from a post …

The “Intersection – It’s Political” project asks how structures of discrimination can be made tangible – especially for those who have not (yet) experienced discrimination themselves. That is precisely the purpose of an interactive smartphone game distinguished by two qualities: It is competitive – and it is unfair. Some players start with privileges, others with handicaps, depending on which character they are assigned. In the film, this game serves as a starting point, visualisation, and reality check for a group of six people who are actively committed to fighting to identify social injustice and discrimination and publicly opposing them.
The exchange between those six around the table makes it clear how ubiquitous racism, sexism, ableism, queerphobia, and transphobia are. And that, at a time when right-wing parties are growing stronger across the globe and marginalised groups are denied rights, it is all the more important to work against inequality not only in one’s own bubble, derided as “woke”, but also to influence the equally often quoted “middle of society”. Questions of how to reach this important, but often sluggish mass, of language and identity in the discourse about discrimination are just as much part of the discussion as strategies to protect themselves from frustration and burnout.