Animation sequences of game pieces, fashion drawings, autobiographical notes and legal files are layered by the filmmaker Betina Kuntzsch into a cinematic collage about the life of her mother, a fashion designer in the German Democratic Republic, GDR. In Chinese Checkers she illustrates a 20th century biography: growing up in the Nazi era, teenage years in post-war Germany, the building of The Wall, and life in the GDR as well as in a united Germany after the fall of The Wall. It is a story of escaping and conforming, playing along and doubting.… >>>
- Director: Betina Kuntzsch
LA LIBERTAD is a “greca” film, a meander film, with no beginning nor end, weaving together fragments of daily life at the Navarro´s, counting threads and time, wondering and wandering around words as emancipation, labor, and freedom (la libertad), the word that most appeared in the conversations. The “greca”, the meander, is the main symbol weaved in the textiles made by the Navarro sisters, from Santo Tomás Jalieza, México. In the textiles, animals, objects and spaces are represented. Their fabrics are made in the backstrap loom, a prehispanic technique preserved by indigenous women for centuries. Through textiles, the women have built the archives of a different history of Mexico´s crosscultural relationships, “mestizaje”, colonialism and modernity.… >>>
- Director: Laura Huertas Millan
The white dolls made for young American girls and the representations they convey go along with the history of white supremacy and racism in the US. But, between 1840 and 1940, nameless African-American women made black dolls out of cloth for their children, or for the white children they took care of, as acts of pride and resistance. The extraordinary Neff Collection of 200 Black Dolls, displayed and published for the first time in 2015, tells this unique story, which mingles intimacy and politics, art, childhood, and femininity. Like Dolls I’ll Rise is a film about dolls, made with dolls, archives, and the voices of yesterday and today, in the service of women’s history and the history of Black American girls.… >>>
