In the broadest sense, the body can be seen as an archive that stores experiences. Can body archives also pass into DNA? Can memories and traumas be transmitted transgenerationally? Researchers in epigenetics at the Max Planck Institute say: Yes, certain imprints that become apparent through experience can be passed on to descendants. In the film program THE PAST IS PRESENT, artists embark on genealogical research to confront the effects of their family history in a witty way. (Afsun Moshiry)
BETWEEN DELICATE AND VIOLENT is an experimental documentary that considers hands as memory places that can both accumulate and transfer memories. Through hands and their creations, it imagines unearthing lost memories that have not been included in performative, socially acceptable family albums. Can we see the violence of the painter's hands in the brush strokes of his paintings? Could cross-stitch be an alphabet of some sort? The video connects with the director's personal past through imagination and creation, while opening up to larger human stories such as domestic violence and intergenerational trauma and resistance.… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
- Director: Şirin Bahar Demirel
The film ESTATE. deals with the unspoken. A family reappraisal triggered by a letter written by the filmmaker's grandmother to her grandfather in 1963. The gaze falls on the unhealable wound in the face of death. The Film is not about betrayal per se, but about how we deal with injustice that has not been spoken, that cannot be rectified in death.
"Would my grandma's anger, had it been made public, have changed anything about my grandpa's position of power? Perhaps there is a piece of futility in this questioning, but perhaps it is also useful to bring a glimpse of this darkness to see that the time of angry women has begun to fight for their rights and their just place in society." (Anika Wagner)
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Premiere:
World Premiere
- Director: Anika Danielle Wagner
Hometown, Russia. Flaking off wallpaper, grandparents' flat. Now my parents live here. Once or twice a year, I come to visit them. Like my mother says: “For parents you always stay children", and there is truth in her words. I wonder and attempt to be present.… >>>
Nominated:
A38-Production Grant Kassel-Halle
In THE FRUIT TREE a young woman, Sharleece, wanders through a house that is available to rent in the sleepy desert town where she lives, California City. Looking out of the window evokes unexpected memories of her childhood home in Los Angeles.… >>>
Nominated:
Goldener Key
- Director: Isabelle Tollenaere
People who committed suicide and babies who died before being baptised were not accepted in Catholic cemeteries until not so long ago. Desperate relatives secretly sought out a dignified place for their bodies. Burials that shared hills and wind with executed people, atheists, passers-by, protestants... The bells never rang for “the others” and yet, outside the cemetery, outside the institution, death is transformed into a landscape.… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
- Director: Edurne Rubio Barredo
