A
Film Archive
“His name is Abdullah”, the doctor in the hospital tells the mother whose son just had a psychotic episode. For the first time in his life, Abdullah feels that he is regarded as an autonomous individual. A film about prejudices, narrated by Abdullah himself.
An Incredibly Elastic Man
Karolina Specht
A shapeless man is moulded by his environment and fellow men.
An Incredibly Elastic Man
Animated Film
Poland
2013
5 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
A shapeless man is moulded by his environment and fellow men.
Art War
Marco Wilms
Art as a weapon! Graffiti on Cairo’s walls as a medium of rebellion, Egyptian underground artists as the chroniclers of events. A frenzied trip through colours and rhythms.
Art War
Documentary Film
Germany
2013
87 minutes
subtitles:
German
English
Art is a weapon! This motto still holds true in Cairo. After 30 years of autocracy, President Mubarak was swept away by his people. Now the street belongs to them, the young rebels and artists. Graffiti sprayers and painters make the walls speak. They recount the days of fighting in blood-smeared portraits, the time of anarchy in wild collages, the attempts of liberation from a suppressed sexuality in obscene pictures. Walls become a chronicle of the rush of events; electro pop and rap supply a thrilling soundtrack. Euphoria is followed by overpainting and destruction. Snipers are at work, aiming at the protesters’ eyes. The revolution is no more romantic than this underground art, whose aim is to provoke and take risks, is accommodating.
In one episode, director Marco Wilms draws a line back to the historic murals of the age of the Pharaohs. In a country with a high illiteracy rate, such traditions become a tried and tested medium of revolt. In a wild tour de force through the past two years of permanent and radical upheavals, “Art War” shows the dangerous dance on the volcano as a trip driven forward by the colours and rhythms of the Egyptian painters and musicians.
Cornelia Klauß
Honorary Mention in the German Competition Documentary Film 2013
In one episode, director Marco Wilms draws a line back to the historic murals of the age of the Pharaohs. In a country with a high illiteracy rate, such traditions become a tried and tested medium of revolt. In a wild tour de force through the past two years of permanent and radical upheavals, “Art War” shows the dangerous dance on the volcano as a trip driven forward by the colours and rhythms of the Egyptian painters and musicians.
Cornelia Klauß
Honorary Mention in the German Competition Documentary Film 2013
Boy
Ginan Seidl, Yalda Afsah
How does a girl escape the restrictions inscribed in the role of females in a traditional society? By becoming a “Boy”. In Afghanistan, “bachaposh” are girls who are raised as boys.
Boy
Documentary Film
Germany
2015
30 minutes
subtitles:
English
Credits
Ray Peter Maletzki, Stephan Helmut Beier
Ginan Seidl, Yalda Afsah
Ginan Seidl
Ginan Seidl, Yalda Afsah
Steffen Martin, Manuela Schininá
How does a girl escape the restrictions inscribed in the role of females in a traditional society? By becoming a “Boy”. In Afghanistan, “bachaposh” are girls who are raised as boys. The artist duo Afsah/Seidl follows two girls and their choice of the role they want to take in life, creating a touching study of gender and freedom in dreamlike images and long tracking shots that capture the people in their social environment.
Grit Lemke
Grit Lemke
Das kalte Eisen
Thomas Lauterbach
Weapons in Germany: riflemen and collectors, the parents of the Winnenden victims, a gunsmith with a sense of professional honour. A multi-faceted examination of guilt and responsibility.
Das kalte Eisen
The volume of arms seized or turned in and annually destroyed by Baden-Württemberg’s arms disposal service is said to be measured in tons. It’s a measure taken to minimize violence, or at least “opportunity” – such as the one taken by a 17-year-old boy in March 2009 when he took his father’s gun to his former school and killed 15 people. Jana Schober and Nina Denise Mayer were among the victims. Jana’s father and Nina’s mother have been actively working to support the destruction of firearms ever since. The amateur shooters, hunters and gun collectors, though, are rather sceptical, sometimes even angry, about this so-called “review of Winnenden”. And then there is the local gunsmith, who makes excellent precision firearms and suffers because nowadays, as he says, his profession is more despised than a prostitute’s. Thomas Lauterbach takes a close look at the personal concerns of his protagonists, giving us extraordinary insights into the different perspectives on the issue. His film examines very diverse facets of the question of guilt and responsibility. But above all, he finds astonishing ways to shake up a specific view of life.
Claudia Lehmann
Claudia Lehmann
Déjà-moo
Stefan Müller
What do a hysterical mother, two paramedics and a crazy cow have in common? They guarantee ...
Déjà-moo
What do a hysterical mother, two paramedics and a crazy cow have in common? They guarantee chaos in the Alps, which could be so idyllic otherwise. Through an unfortunate series of accidents and misunderstandings a young man from Berlin ends up in hospital. A surreal nightmare begins which staggers from Kafkaesque to psychedelic.
Der Kuaför aus der Keupstraße
Andreas Maus
The NSU nail bomb attack that injured 22 people in Cologne in 2004, where only the victims were suspected later. Complex reconstruction of a scandal.
Der Kuaför aus der Keupstraße
Wednesday afternoon was deliberately chosen. There were a lot of customers in front of and in the brothers Özcan and Hasan Yildirim’s barbershop on 9 June 2004, when 700 three-inch carpenters’ nails turned into projectiles with a 250 metre range. 22 people were injured. The attack was infamous; the course of the investigations was equally scandalous: the victims were suspected. CCTV material was not analysed and Federal Minister of the Interior Otto Schily decisively ruled out a right wing background. It was only in 2001 that this crime was solved in the course of the revelations concerning the right wing extremist terrorist “National Socialist Underground” group. The trial continues until the present day.
Ten years after the Cologne nail bomb attack, director Andreas Maus focuses on giving a voice to those whom nobody wanted to hear for a long time. He deploys narrative strategies to establish a distance in order to expose how systematically matters were hushed up, suppressed and denied. Documentary and re-enacted material are interwoven, actors perform next to affected persons, spaces are reconstructed. Maus overwrites the hackneyed televised images with his own visual inventions. The camera stops, the look at the audience freezes. One is tempted to ask what exactly is supposed to come after the “culture of welcome”?
Cornelia Klauß
Ten years after the Cologne nail bomb attack, director Andreas Maus focuses on giving a voice to those whom nobody wanted to hear for a long time. He deploys narrative strategies to establish a distance in order to expose how systematically matters were hushed up, suppressed and denied. Documentary and re-enacted material are interwoven, actors perform next to affected persons, spaces are reconstructed. Maus overwrites the hackneyed televised images with his own visual inventions. The camera stops, the look at the audience freezes. One is tempted to ask what exactly is supposed to come after the “culture of welcome”?
Cornelia Klauß
Die Angst des Wolfs vor dem Wolf
Juliane Jaschnow
A howl in the wilderness. A shape moves back and forth in the bloody red flickering light of a double fight – against the wolf, but even more against the fear of the wolf. No escape, the razor’s edge – powerfully eloquent.
Die Angst des Wolfs vor dem Wolf
A howl in the wilderness. A shape moves back and forth in the bloody red flickering light of a double fight – against the wolf, but even more against the fear of the wolf. No escape, the razor’s edge – powerfully eloquent. An equally minimalist and gripping film poem by filmmaker Juliane Jaschnow and writer Stefan Petermann about the dialectics of becoming a victim or a perpetrator. Whatever side you’re on: you’ll lose if you stay as you are.
Nadja Rademacher
Nadja Rademacher
Die Reise zum sichersten Ort der Erde
Edgar Hagen
Around the world in search of a safe final storage site for nuclear waste. Scientists, politicians, lobbyists, and their opponents in a panopticon of madness.
Die Reise zum sichersten Ort der Erde
Documentary Film
Switzerland
2013
100 minutes
subtitles:
German
Whereas Edgar Hagen observed psychiatric patients in his last films, he now looks into the abysses of a mentally disturbed society. A society that believes in a technology which has increasingly proved to be uncontrollable and keeps promoting it against its better judgment. Because it supposedly exists, the safest place on earth, where deathly nuclear waste can be stored harmlessly for hundreds of thousands of years.
Playing dumb in the tradition of the medieval fool, Hagen asks to see this place. He travels around the world, from Switzerland to Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, China, Japan, the United States, Australia, and back. He crosses oceans and deserts, hikes through forests and moors, explores the interiors of mountains. The scenery grows more and more unreal, the Grail more and more distant. Hagen meets geologists and nuclear lobbyists, environmental activists, tribal leaders, and local politicians. Some of them convinced of the cause, others doubtful. There is a lot of talk about “proof” and “fundamental feasibility”. But he digs deeper, seemingly naive. This narrative attitude enables him to neatly expose all the justification strategies of the nuclear industry as constructs that have long ago ceased to be concerned with technical feasibility and deal only with selling the impossible. A film about madness.
Grit Lemke
Playing dumb in the tradition of the medieval fool, Hagen asks to see this place. He travels around the world, from Switzerland to Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, China, Japan, the United States, Australia, and back. He crosses oceans and deserts, hikes through forests and moors, explores the interiors of mountains. The scenery grows more and more unreal, the Grail more and more distant. Hagen meets geologists and nuclear lobbyists, environmental activists, tribal leaders, and local politicians. Some of them convinced of the cause, others doubtful. There is a lot of talk about “proof” and “fundamental feasibility”. But he digs deeper, seemingly naive. This narrative attitude enables him to neatly expose all the justification strategies of the nuclear industry as constructs that have long ago ceased to be concerned with technical feasibility and deal only with selling the impossible. A film about madness.
Grit Lemke
Himmelverbot
Andrei Schwartz
Hrib, who protested his innocence for more than 20 years, is released from a prison near Bucharest. A painful rehabilitation and growing doubts: Is it all a lie?
Himmelverbot
Romanian-born director Andrei Schwartz met Gavril Hrib, who had been sentenced to life for murdering a public prosecutor, in 2002, when he was shooting his film “Jailbirds” at the high security prison of Rahova near Bucharest. After more than 20 years Hrib is finally released on probation, into a country he knows only from the Ceauşescu era. Romania, now a part of the European Union, has changed, including a new jurisdiction that allows early releases. Hrib, a lanky guy with a kippah under his baseball cap, knows how to win hearts with his sly wit and gawky helplessness. He worked hard to earn respect inside; outside he comes up against nothing but rejection and closed doors. Andrei Schwartz traces this painful attempt at rehabilitation over several years. What becomes manifest is that neither society nor Gavril Hrib are ready and that everything ultimately leads back to the starting point: the actual crime.
Cornelia Klauß
Cornelia Klauß
Jedes Bild ist ein leeres Bild
Christoph Faulhaber
The artist’s alter ego, his video game avatar, explores public space. Virtual reality, surveillance, video clip, document, fiction, and a wild ride.
Jedes Bild ist ein leeres Bild
Credits
Protostyle Pictures
Christoph Faulhaber
Pawel Wieleba, Otto Bode, John Francis, The Superpowers, The Embassadors, Harmony Hopper, Oliver Samlaus, Skuzzle Buzz, Giacomo Puccini, Christoph Faulhaber, Frank Müller et al.
Lukasz Chrobok, Christoph Faulhaber, Daniel Matzke, Jayson Haedrich, Gregor Gärtner, Jens Apitz
Maren Großmann, Anna Werner, Wolfgang Lehmann, Ramon Urselmann, Jonathan Miske
Thorsten Ernst, Christoph Faulhaber
Pawel Wieleba, Modo Bierkamp
There is the idea that public space is an actuality without prerequisites, which has evolved around us without alternative. For quite a while now, Christoph Faulhaber has countered such ideas with apparently naive questions. He simply re-dedicates intimidations and prohibitions and uses them as material for his equally subversive and meaningful statements.
Faulhaber has clear ideas of what the “venue” of art should be. His performances neither take shape in a safe studio nor are they presented exclusively behind the well cleaned windows of galleries. He prefers to stage his experiments against the order of the ruling systems right in the midst of society. After he was prohibited from taking photos of a US embassy, for example, he simply turned the tables and guarded the embassy so it wouldn’t be photographed by the public. This action in turn was documented on photographs that he then exhibited at documenta 12 – without an official invitation, of course –, which was promptly terminated. When he tried to enter the US as a German scholarship holder with a legal visa later, he was interrogated and urged to leave the country.
What this film teaches us in the most inspiring manner: the negotiation of power and the part images play in this process.
Ralph Eue
Faulhaber has clear ideas of what the “venue” of art should be. His performances neither take shape in a safe studio nor are they presented exclusively behind the well cleaned windows of galleries. He prefers to stage his experiments against the order of the ruling systems right in the midst of society. After he was prohibited from taking photos of a US embassy, for example, he simply turned the tables and guarded the embassy so it wouldn’t be photographed by the public. This action in turn was documented on photographs that he then exhibited at documenta 12 – without an official invitation, of course –, which was promptly terminated. When he tried to enter the US as a German scholarship holder with a legal visa later, he was interrogated and urged to leave the country.
What this film teaches us in the most inspiring manner: the negotiation of power and the part images play in this process.
Ralph Eue
No Signal
Katharina Huber
The violence is planned. Whether as a protest or simply a statement, the manifesto and the stone to throw are ready. Now it’s a matter of waiting, killing time and mentally preparing for the confrontation.
No Signal
Animated Film
UK
2014
6 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
The violence is planned. Whether as a protest or simply a statement, the manifesto and the stone to throw are ready. Now it’s a matter of waiting, killing time and mentally preparing for the confrontation. Like a warrior. But the fear won’t go away and every sound, every movement reminds you of what may be about to happen.
Annegret Richter
Annegret Richter
Patch
Gerd Gockell
An experimental animated short film using abstract painting to explore the tension field between abstraction and recognisability.
Patch
Animated Film
Germany,
Switzerland
2014
3 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
An experimental animated short film using abstract painting to explore the tension field between abstraction and recognisability.
Simulacra
Ivana Bošnjak, Thomas Johnson
In hallways filled with illusions, a man is trying to find out if he is looking at a stranger or a hidden part of himself.
Simulacra
Animated Film
Croatia
2014
8 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
Croatian animation is certainly the most developed one in the region. This sophisticated stop motion tale spurs us to question ourselves, pondering who we are and how much we know about ourselves. The mood and variety of textures and intriguing objects lend a special suspense and flavour to this work.
Rada Šešić
Rada Šešić
Striche ziehen.
Gerd Kroske
Punk in Weimar, two brothers and a betrayal, prison, departure and action art at the Berlin wall. GDR archaeology bursting with cheerful, noisy anarchy and lines that extend to the present day.
Striche ziehen.
“The White Stripe” was the name of an art project in which five GDR citizens from the Weimar punk and underground scene who had left the GDR in 1986 wanted to paint a line around the Western side of the Berlin wall. On the second day, GDR border guards ambushed them and one of the friends ended up in Bautzen prison. Only after years in the West did they find out that in the GDR one of them had reported their activities – and about his brother.
Gerd Kroske plumbs the depths of betrayal, suppression and forgiveness in interviews with the protagonists, including a brash (and not unsympathetic) border guard, supported by a wealth of archive material with the scratchy, anarchic charm of Super 8 and ORWO. He insists without discrediting. The deeper he delves into the past, the more it recedes in favour of the question how both sides continued to live with the betrayal. The topicality of this story emerges in the great final showdown between the brothers as well as in the recurring images of the wall between Israel and Palestine. It’s not that easy to paint lines even today. Especially if it’s the line you want to draw under something.
Grit Lemke
Gerd Kroske plumbs the depths of betrayal, suppression and forgiveness in interviews with the protagonists, including a brash (and not unsympathetic) border guard, supported by a wealth of archive material with the scratchy, anarchic charm of Super 8 and ORWO. He insists without discrediting. The deeper he delves into the past, the more it recedes in favour of the question how both sides continued to live with the betrayal. The topicality of this story emerges in the great final showdown between the brothers as well as in the recurring images of the wall between Israel and Palestine. It’s not that easy to paint lines even today. Especially if it’s the line you want to draw under something.
Grit Lemke
Valentina, 26
Alexander Riedel
She came from Kosovo at the age of four and has finally arrived after years of “temporary admission”. An example of successful integration, but mainly the fun portrait of a wild chick.
Valentina, 26
Documentary Film
Germany
2015
45 minutes
subtitles:
German
Credits
Bettina Timm
Alexander Riedel
Michael Leuthner
Ulrike Tortora
Björn Rothe
In 2007 we met Valentina in Leipzig as the protagonist of Alexander Riedel’s film “Run Out”. Her unrestrained vitality and aggression in the midst of the agony of a Munich home for asylum seekers left a lasting impression – even though no one believed that she would easily make it in this Germany which even then was not waiting for someone like her – from Kosovo, an “economic refugee”!
1. Valentina herself never saw the film completely or at least can’t remember whether she did, as she makes clear today, eight years later – in her inimitable way which, thank God, hasn’t changed. And, 2., no she didn’t make it easily. But she did, very impressively.
Isn’t this boring – a film about a successful integration? Where is the much quoted height of the dramatic hero’s fall? Okay folks, look at Valentina! She definitely doesn’t fit the mould of the “positive heroine”. When we see her speed through Munich with a patient (attention: she’s working as a nurse!), slouched on the wheelchair’s arm rest, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, we realise: the sponti slogan of the past, “Don’t leave us alone with these Germans!” was answered. We can never have enough people like Valentina.
Grit Lemke
1. Valentina herself never saw the film completely or at least can’t remember whether she did, as she makes clear today, eight years later – in her inimitable way which, thank God, hasn’t changed. And, 2., no she didn’t make it easily. But she did, very impressively.
Isn’t this boring – a film about a successful integration? Where is the much quoted height of the dramatic hero’s fall? Okay folks, look at Valentina! She definitely doesn’t fit the mould of the “positive heroine”. When we see her speed through Munich with a patient (attention: she’s working as a nurse!), slouched on the wheelchair’s arm rest, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, we realise: the sponti slogan of the past, “Don’t leave us alone with these Germans!” was answered. We can never have enough people like Valentina.
Grit Lemke
