The program links the question of the reality of images to migration and attempts to
detach the latter from its empirical context. Migration is not solely the process between
departure and arrival at the new home. Movement, often across borders, might often be the
foundation, but not exclusively and not in every case. Only after having arrived can you start
to develop. The migrant experience evolves like a living being over time, taking on different
forms and characteristics. What is central about migration is hence often impossible to express
through language, or to represent through imagery, or to grasp through scientific vocabulary.
The 'reality' of migration necessitates artistic articulations and formal experiments,
like those preceding the moving image, to create a palpable realm of experience in which we can
empathize.
The Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) in Göttingen aimed at capturing all the movement processes of the world on celluloid. The biological, technical and ethnological films that the IWF produced, archived and distributed worldwide were supposed to be “documents of reality”. Without using commentary, they should make movements visible, storable and re-analyzable at any time. Can some pictures be more real than others? The essay film UNLEARNING FLOW examines both National Socialist prehistory and the legacy of the IWF. It reveals the ideology of the distant, objectifying camera view and also the active white washing of the Institute’s history after World War II.… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
Nominated:
Goldener Key
- Director: Christoph Oeschger,Sarine Waltenspül,Mario Schulze
On 28 October 2015, a migrant boat left the coast of Western Turkey heading to the closest European coast—the Greek island of Lesvos. The sea was rough, and the boat was old and overcrowded with more than 300 passengers. It sank 280m beyond the maritime border into Greece, in EU territorial waters, resulting in the death of at least 43 people. It was the deadliest incident in a period known as the ‘long summer of migration’, when over a million refugees and migrants attempted to reach EU shores by sea. The incident was widely reported in international media. That reporting credited Frontex, the EU’s border agency, and the Greek coastguard, as having carried out of a successful and competent rescue operation. Our analysis disputes this, however, and opens up possibilities for civil society groups to call for accountability for lives lost in the Mediterranean. One of the survivors, the artist Amel Alzakout recorded the journey and the shipwreck on a waterproof camera attached to her wrist. This footage provides a unique situated perspective of this tragic event at the threshold of Europe.… >>>
- Director: Forensic Architecture
The video work focuses on the fundamental structure of film and its relation with concepts such as time, space, and movement. While the invention and evolution of cinema are in fact based on the illusive nature of human perception, the medium is broadly known as the closest form for capturing real-time movement. By taking into account issues such as time perception, memory, and displacement, the formal experiments here aim to highlight the dichotomy between reality and illusion in the nature of film. The work is inspired by the artist's self-reflections upon personal perceptions of time, space, and movement through his immigration experience from Iran to Canada and the adaption process in his new home. RESTLESS PIECES OF TIME is an assemblage of a series of short video sequences, originally presented in form of an installation, but here interlinked through lines of poetry written by the filmmaker.… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
