A cinematic exploration of places with a complex past and uncertain futures. The films in the program navigate through four spaces in which oppression stories, entangled materialities, and power relations merge in intricated and often hidden narratives. How to accompany, live with and within and heal these politically, historically, and toxically loaded places? How to make visible their contradictions and their fragility? (Maria Morata)
Ode to demolition. Resounding thunder accompanies the sparks of exploding fireworks. Faint points of light grow into glittering fountains and cascades and illuminate what initially resembles a completely foggy night sky.
These images turn out to be different interior spaces, flashed in phases by the ignition, sites that have long since given up their original functionality. In the explosion they are combined into a dwelling of spectacle. Director Eginhartz Kanter layers the destruction: damage to the building, damage to the film material, bombastic damage audio of a fictionalized past, the preservation of the moment in decay. (Melanie Letschnig)… >>>
- Director: Eginhartz Kanter
A filmmaker puzzles over aerial photographs from early 20th century Iraq and Egypt, and finds herself increasingly unsettled by images that want to share their violent secrets. England has been colonized by a marauding spirit and the Empire’s undead start to speak back to the film’s troubled investigator. Moving between recent and distant pasts, this documentary is a ghost story that explores horror – both real and imagined.… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
- Director: Miranda Pennell
ETERNIT investigates the role of modernist architect Paul Baumgarten in the distribution of asbestos products in post-war Germany. Richard Dmitri Hees is going to the archive with his camcorder, visits an asbestos-filled villa and looks for torn-down factories. On crisscrossing paths through Berlin, the documentary is tracing the history of Germany’s leading architect in asbestos-technology.… >>>
Nominated:
A38-Production Grant Kassel-Halle
- Director: Richard Dmitri Hees
A landscape of electronic equipment leftovers, embedded in biting clouds of smoke, burnt earth and dirty water. In Agbogbloshie – one of the world's largest e-waste recycling sites in the middle of Accra – they were dismantled and burnt in order to return their metals to the industrial recycling cycles. In between, an observer who, by means of acoustic field research, investigates this place as a contact zone of complex global economic, social, power-political and technological processes and questions this from a spiritual perspective.… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
- Director: Elom 20ce, Chihying Musquiqui, Gregor Kasper
