A diving spectacle amidst the German republic: HERE starts in Hamburg-Neumühlendocked to the refugee residential ship Bibby Challenge. Barely at the scene, filmmaker AdnanSoftić, once a Bibby Challenge resident himself, seeks to find with us “solid ground,” – in vain, because the trip proceeds in a swamp in upper Hessian Feldatal. Heinz bought that swamp after the war. Something of a dull-luck is also in the Bergisches Land where the Wupper riverflows into the Rhineland. At Carl-Duisburg-Park monuments from the sculptor Fritz Klimschvanish, as a few meters away the Bayer corporation expands its power in the agrarian and pharmaceutical sector all over the globe. We exit HERE as we swim beneath the Mayor-Smidt-bridge in Bremen. Mayor Johann Smidt has distinguished himself through his commitment to the deportation of Jews from Bremen, as we learn from Virgil Taylor while he asks “What was it once it was there? Or, rather, was it once? It was there - rather then? Is it were again:...”
BETTER SCIENCE is a short experimental documentary investigating the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of statues from a park just meters away from the global headquarters of chemical corporation Bayer in Leverkusen, Germany. The sculptures had been commissioned in the 1930s to Fritz Klimsch, a German sculptor included in Goebbels’s "Gottbegnadete" list of artists crucial to Nazi culture. Shot over three years with the background of Bayer’s 2018 acquisition of Monsanto, the film sheds new light on the relationship between the German agrochemical giant and its Nazi past as the chemical conglomerate IG Farben. Through dialogues with lawyers, activists, a bomb disposal expert and Bayer's CEO, BETTER SCIENCE creates a poetic take on the company's current massive expansion of its global agricultural and pharmaceutical power. .… >>>
Nominated:
Goldener Key
- Director: Walter Solon, Jorge Loureiro
Bürgermeister-Smidt-Brücke in Bremen spans the Weser to both banks, at the tip of the Teerhof, through the heart of the German city-state. Bürgermeister Johann Smidt was a preeminent Bremer statesman in the first half of the nineteenth century. He is perhaps best known for the founding of Bremerhaven, in an effort to save the faltering Hansestadt from its silting river. As Senator, he represented the city-state in the Congress of Vienna where the new German Confederation took shape. Smidt took extra care to assure the individual German states would be allowed to separately determine the citizenship of the Jewish people living within their boundaries. It was his life’s work to exclude Bremen’s Jews from political and social life. Bürgermeister-Smidt-Brücke was named for Smidt as part of Bremen’s inchoate denazification after World War II. The film HANSA BOY ETWAS DAS KOMMT NIE WIEDER VOR directly addresses the namesake of the bridge. It intends to lay open the fate of the unspeakable history bound up in the structure’s name.… >>>
Nominated:
A38-Production Grant Kassel-Halle
