The doors to the vaults of public broadcasting in Germany are opening. Behind them lies an immeasurable treasure of educational content, historical time documents, film history. In order to make this accessible to a diverse public, models of future archival practice are needed. ‘The Fifth Wall’ gathers films, reports, talks, texts, letters and photos of filmmaker and editor Navina Sundaram from 40 years of working for television. Extracted from ARD archives as well as Sundaram’s private archive, ‘The Fifth Wall’ is a curated look at German migration and media history. Navina Sundaram takes center stage as an author who takes a journalistic stance: on internationalism and decolonization, class issues, racism, immigration, on Indian and German politics. As part of the dokumentarfilmwoche hamburg, the archive ‘The Fifth Wall’ will be transferred to the exhibition space of the festival center in the fux eG. Throughout five thematic days, a screening and discussion platform opens up here that poses questions about migration, gender relations, postcolonial structures, among others, and relates them to contemporary debates about documentary film, journalistic ethics and the medium of television.

Curated and texts by: Mareike Bernien, Merle Kröger

Opening hours:
April 25 to 29, daily 10 am to 8 pm
April 30, 12 am to 6 pm
On April 25 and 28, from 2 to 3 pm, there will be an open discussion in the exhibition with guests.

www.die-fuenfte-wand.de

The filmic exposures continued into April … His film begins where ‘December 1-31’ left off twenty years ago: In the Helicopter. In a “stream of constant thought” Peters flies us through his everyday life, his systems of order and to-do lists, past banal water damage or into the winter vacation with the family: an igloo is built, ‘Nanook’ sends its regards. In any case, the stories disintegrate – one way or another – into images, sometimes more, sometimes less visible, sometimes latently stored, sometimes colorful, sometimes black and white, developed in coffee and washing soda. No “beginnings at the right place” and “everything breaks off after 3 minutes without an end”. That’s the concept. The endurance of the images into film history also seems to be a matter of the glue used. (jk)

Growing up in secular post-independence India, Navina Sundaram describes herself as a “child of the Nehru era.” Later, as an NDR journalist, she reports on decolonization processes in the 70s, which she accompanies in solidarity. She made the film ‘As Long as There Are Tears’ about India’s political development since the founding of the state in 1947, traveled to Bangladesh shortly after its independence from Pakistan for ‘Freedom and Its Price’, reported on the transfer of the murdered freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral to Guinea-Bissau or from Western Sahara after the withdrawal of the Spanish troops for ‘Tagesschau’ and ‘Weltspiegel’. The theme day puts a spotlight on this period, which shaped Sundaram’s self-image as the “voice of the South” on German television.

www.die-fuenfte-wand.de

The talk will focus on personal stories and how they are tied to social and political developments. A re-examination of problematic family histories may provide insights for the future on how larger, pressing problems of the “Capitalocene” would need to be addressed.
We previously dedicated a retrospective to Travis Wilkerson’s films in 2018.

www.creativeagitation.com
www.traviswilkersonfilms.com

> Nuclear Family

The sheep stop and look for a new path. Often only their bleating can be heard. We are not in the countryside, but in the Casa de Campo, a sprawling city park in Madrid. Atmospheric scenes follow one another, inviting us to lose ourselves in the paths of the sheep, shepherds and their dogs. Again and again the city enters the picture. Here the shadow of a cable car, there the outline of a roller coaster above the treetops. Lambs are picked up by a transporter. A lonely boxer fights the surrounding trees, the metro squeaks to a halt nearby. Then night falls. The sheep come to rest, the toads take over – and the city flickers on the horizon. (sp)

 Illegal logging is arduous work under extreme conditions. The film carefully observes the precarious business of the loggers and reveals a contradiction that is difficult to endure in the shallows of the forest. The destruction of the forest deprives people of their livelihood and at the same time seems to be the only way to generate an income large enough to provide for their families. Finally, with the piecemeal removal of the wood, the film also points to a problematic trade chain, at the end of which stands an international market with its insatiable hunger for the scarce resource. (mr)

It was also during this time that he began his diary, in which he recorded that certain animal or plant species were becoming rarer or no longer existed at all. Mahrt arranges the animals he has stuffed in fields and meadows, photographs them for the scrapbook albums that were popular at the time. His legacy, consisting of colored photographs, notes, and animal and insect specimens, still provides data on species extinction and bears witness to landscapes and animals that have almost completely disappeared due to human intervention. An archival approach by the filmmaker to the unknown great-grandfather, who in many ways remains enigmatic. (jk)

There she questions her biography, that of her family members and former classmates about the influence of social background on their lives. The underlying interest in the concept of class society touches on the industrial history of the 20th century and the labor migration inscribed therein, all the way to today’s new residents in their villas. In this way, this audiovisually versatile video essay puts the neoliberal paradigm of equal opportunities and self-determined life plans up for discussion. (mr)

In 1964, Sundaram came to Hamburg at the age of 19 and began training at Norddeutscher Rundfunk. Six years later she is the first permanent editor of color in the political center of the ARD, the editorial department “Zeitgeschehen”. In addition to international politics, she increasingly deals with domestic issues, especially the intertwining of migration, racism and asylum policy. The theme day compiles various features and contributions that deal with the complex topic of everyday and institutional racism in the Federal Republic – a country that explicitly does not see itself as a country of immigration and tries to prevent permanent immigration through the recruitment stop in 1973 and the deterrent asylum policy of the 1980s.

www.die-fuenfte-wand.de

We continue with ‘Stop Filming Us But Listen’ (2022), the Congolese reworking of the Dutch film by Joris Postema. The latter’s ‘Stop Filming Us’ (2020) will be shown again at the fux Lichtspiele. Bernadette Vivuya, one half of the directorial team, will be our guest, as will Ganza Buroko, cultural manager from Burkina Faso and producer of ‘Stop Filming Us But Listen’. Both are active in the cultural and educational center Yolé!Africa in Goma, and we will talk to them in depth about dealing with colonial images and gaze regimes and production conditions in contemporary documentary film.

> Stop filming us but listen
> Stop filming us

We are talking about ‘Stop Filming Us’ by Joris Postema, which we screened in 2021. In ‘Stop Filming Us But Listen’ two Congolese directors develop these questions further. They appropriate, discard and recontextualize Postema’s material. The cultural center Yolé!Africa in Goma, in which the directors and the producer are engaged, plays a central role in the examination of the legacy of colonial gaze regimes. (mg)

> Stop filming us
> Werkstattgespräch

Student Morgane Frund agrees to digitise his video archive. In the process, she discovers that Urs didn’t just film bears: time and again, the amateur filmmaker zooms in on young women’s bare legs and cleavage – apparently without their consent. When the filmmaker confronts him about his objectifying gaze, a conversation emerges about voyeurism, power, and the violent dimension of the “male gaze.” The precisely edited clash of idyllic animal shots and voyeuristically viewed women’s bodies opens a meta-discourse on gaze and power relations in documentary filmmaking. (ek)

www.morganefrund.ch

Starting from the topography of this river and the people who spend their time along it, Bertin and Sattel approach the site cautiously and in fragmentary fashion, uncovering piece by piece the connections of a complex past and present. Polyphonic and open, ‘Tara’ tells of economic exploitation and the beginnings of industrialization, large scale pollution as well as the myths that surround the landscape and the people who live and survive in precarious conditions. (sh)

www.cinemalovers.de/pressematerial-tara/

During filming, the corona pandemic begins and the labor market, already in permanent crisis mode, is hit hard. And so the structural misery of neoliberalised working conditions becomes all the more apparent, ironically almost a stroke of luck for the film, because from pure observation comes undivided empathy: ‚Für die Vielen‘ is the portrait of an institution that – always friendly and patient – advises, mediates, goes to court, organizes cultural offerings, mediates economic discourse, and has been fighting for justice for a 100 years now. Direct Cinema at it’s best! (mg)

The Israeli Nature Protection Law prohibits the picking of ‘Akkoub (a type of artichoke) and Za’atar (wild thyme), two plants that are traditionally part of the menu of Palestinian cuisine. Many have been gathering them for generations, including on the slopes of the West Bank. In the film, real herb gatherers meet gamekeeper actors, re-enacted courtroom scenes meet archival television footage, and Western quotes, offering a thoroughly humorous insight into a complex situation. The strongest documentary moment is once again perhaps that which is not said, in the interview with an Israeli plantation owner. (mg)

This theme day is dedicated to cultural transfer, appropriation and re-appropriation strategies. In ‘Bharata Natyam’ Sundaram dissects the Indian dance of the same name into its individual motifs and playfully conveys it to a German television audience. The awakening Western interest in the Hare Krishna movement as well as transcendental meditation and yoga are questioned in ‘On the Way to Bliss’. In ‘Talking, My Drug – Singing, My Sex…’ Indian jazz singer Asha Puthli provocatively turns Western notions of the Asian woman on their head. An interview with author Salman Rushdie addresses the literary dispossession of the English language. The program ends with a film by Sundaram about her aunt, the painter Amrita Sher-Gil, who is now considered the founder of Indian modernism.

www.die-fuenfte-wand.de

They are influenced by avant-garde, experimental forms and the writings of Walter Benjamin. We are pleased to engage in a workshop discussion with him on ethical and political issues of his film practice and the cinematographic medium as a powerful political tool.

> Nuit Obscure

Captain Dariush, for example, is one of the 21 defendants on trial in Italy for “aiding and abetting illegal immigration”. The work of both on the ground, on the rescue ships run by private initiatives, in the camps, such as Moria, have become part of their everyday life – between two worlds – as well as public relations work against the inhumane European border regime. Thus, ‘North of Libya’ turns from a portrait into a committed commitment of a left-wing civil society scene organizing itself against these policies. (mg)

Filmmaker Benjamin Hassmann shows Venice in the remnants of a canceled carnival. Every now and then he catches a glimpse of his grandfather through the camera, himself exploring the city with childlike delight and his camera. Often, the scenes seem to fall out of the nearly square image – and yet are just barely captured. These observations at the edges and monumental stagings in the center of the picture make ‘Within Sights’ a rich treasure hunt for unfathomable and everyday moments in which small pleasures and great drama shake hands. (sp)

The main aim is to spend all the Hartz IV money at once and quickly. Toni Eckstein, who grew up in a small town in Saxon-Anhalt, with an early preference for make-up and high heels, becomes Nina – after her role model Nina Hagen. The youth beyond the predetermined role as a boy leads to the desire to neither be subordinated nor to be told what to do, to experiences of violence, to various psychiatric institutions and finally to life on the streets in Berlin … ‘Ninas Farbfilm’ is the impressive portrait of a person who doesn’t let herself be told what to do and who surprises with humor and self-reflection on a supposedly predefined path of pain and suffering. (fg)

Streets of newly built villas of eclectic design, expensive cars, a Disney children’s birthday paradise – in structurally weak northern Macedonia the exception rather than the rule. Since 2003, NATO and the U.S. Army have recruited thousands of young northern Macedonians to work in Afghanistan and Iraq, virtually in the engine room of the military infrastructure there. Well-paid jobs that allowed people to invest in real estate back home. But at what price? The film also traces this question, because a large part of the migrant workers returned traumatised with the withdrawal of the US army from Afghanistan. (mg)

Joris Postema and his Dutch team are shooting in Congo in 2020 and are increasingly confronted with problems as the filming progresses: How effective are the colonial gaze regimes to this day, and how does one confront them? ‘Stop Filming Us’ explores these questions in a self-experiment, initiating a confrontation between Congo and Europe: a cinematic dialogue about neocolonial relations and different approaches to means of production. (mg)

> Werkstattgespräch
> Stop Filming Us but Listen

Tamara Trampe travels to the country where she spent the first years of her life in search of the unanswered questions of her own family history. She was born in the winter of 1942 in Russia on the front lines. Her mother, a Ukrainian Red Army nurse, cannot speak of her traumatic experiences until shortly before her death. This loving film weaves together the deeply buried memories of the war veterans and the only remaining uncle with family photos and scenes of their childhood spoken by Trampe. “Everyone experienced something different,” says the mother. The traumas of war and the questions afterward remain universal. (as)

> Podiumsdiskussion
> Weiße Raben

The director listens to the anecdotes of a former bodyguard of Hitler on a Hollywood swing: “Hitler could have been stolen just about anywhere”. The doings and activities of Unity Valkyrie Mitford, a British noblewoman and admirer of the “Führer”, are unfolded, while in parallel U.S. intelligence agents report on their attempts to crawl into the dictator’s head: the first beginnings of the methods of “profiling”. Disturbing moments with Nazi peers alternate with historical footage and voice-over. The essay film celebrated its premiere at the first dokumentarfilmwoche hamburg in 2004. (jk)

Back in the 1970s, his parents took family trips to Montana’s missile sites. Video recordings of the trips paint a bleak picture of U.S. society: the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima are justified in a disturbingly simple way, the Vietnam War and the Cold War are justified with the defense against an “enemy from the outside”. To confront this fear, Travis and Erin Wilkerson and their children set out again for missile sites and test sites. Images of small towns, mountain landscapes, prairies and deserts, often wildlife refuges and reservations, bear witness to contaminated soil and how the myth of the “Great Nation” is layered on top of the colonial invasion of white settlers and the genocide of Native Americans. The danger from nuclear material at home may be greater than the likelihood of an enemy nuclear bomb being dropped on the United States. (jk)

www.creativeagitation.com
www.traviswilkersonfilms.com

> Werkstattgespräch

In the 1983 report ‘Women’s Shelters Overcrowded’, Sundaram holds a mirror up to German society when it comes to the supposedly more progressive character of Western civilization. For her, talking about equality always means talking about economic distribution, global dependencies and working conditions, as the interview with the editors of the Indian magazine ‘Manushi’ shows. The feature ‘Behind every curtain a story’ portrays a theater workshop in Kasauli, where collectively existing and traditional images of women are reflected and scenically reinterpreted in a feminist reading. This theme day concludes with a sharp ‘Tagesthemen’ commentary by Sundaram on the debate surrounding Paragraph 218.

www.die-fuenfte-wand.de

Her mother, a Red Army nurse, then takes her to live with her family in eastern Ukraine, where she grows up with her grandmother. Her mother herself returns to the front. She never meets her biological father. At the age of seven, she moves to the GDR with her mother and her mother’s husband, a German communist, Spanish fighter and concentration camp survivor.
She graduated from high school in Halle and studied German, Slavic studies and art history at the University of Rostock. She received her diploma in 1965. She then worked for three years at the ‘Forum’, a student newspaper in the GDR. After distributing leaflets against the invasion of Soviet troops in Prague, she is fired. She waited tables. In the pub, she meets two directors who place her as a dramaturge at the Workers’ Theater in Eisenhüttenstadt and later take her to film, at DEFA.
Since the 1970s, Tamara Trampe has worked as a dramaturge and consultant on around 90 film projects, including those by Iris Gusner, Herrmann Zschoche, Helga Rademeister and Ulrich Weiß. she realised her first short documentary film as a director, ‘Ich war einmal ein Kind’ (I was once a child), at DEFA in 1986, but it was not until the 1990s that she devoted herself to her own directing projects, always in collaboration with Johann Feindt, whom she met in Leipzig in 1983 and with whom she lived in a relationship ever since (initially still separated by the Wall). Although she made comparatively few films as a director, she leaves behind an immensely important contribution, especially in the context of documentary examination of long, traumatizing aftermaths of wars and instrumentalized state violence. Her interest in the perpetrators was special, as were her unique conversational techniques – which she calls art, as opposed to interviews – with which she makes her protagonists speak freely and directly. Without embellishing or relativizing anything, she meets them humanely and tries to find out how they became what they are.
From 1993 she is a member of the selection committee at DOK Leipzig and also works as a curator. She travels to the states of the former Soviet Union in search of new exciting documentaries. She is well connected and makes discoveries outside the official film studios. Since 2016, Tamara Trampe was a member of the Academy of Arts. In 2018, she received the DEFA Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement in German Film. In September 2021, she was awarded the Honorary Award of the Association of German Film Critics. On November 4, 2021, Tamara Trampe passed away in Berlin at the age of 78.The dokumentarfilmwoche hamburg now dedicates a tribute to the exceptional documentarian and shows two of her directorial works, which experience a sad topicality due to the war in Ukraine: the autobiographical search for traces ‘Meine Mutter, ein Krieg und ich’ (2014) and ‘Weiße Raben – Alptraum Tschetschenien’ (2005) about young Russian soldiers and army members who become perpetrators in the war – and are victims themselves at the same time. (Borjana Gaković)
We commemorate Tamara Trampe with a panel discussion and have invited people who have known and accompanied her for a long time, or who have dealt with her work in depth. We are pleased to welcome her long-time partner and co-director of her films, Johann Feindt, the film journalist Matthias Dell, the director of photgraphy Jule Cramer and the film scholar Borjana Gaković.

> Meine Mutter, ein Krieg und ich
> Weiße Raben

Tamara Trampe approaches the horror of the Chechen war in powerful conversations with bloodied, wounded Russian soldiers, a medic and soldiers’ mothers. Photos show the soldiers in imperial poses; a video by an embedded Russian photographer captures a “purge.” ‘White Ravens’ is thereby not just a film about the war in the Caucasus. It is a film that is about the Chechen war, but also points to every other war in which young men become brutal killers, and victims of war. The film shows exactly this connection: the perpetrators are also victims, and they remain perpetrators at the same time. (tg)

> Meine Mutter, ein Krieg und ich
> Podiumsdiskussion

Gitta Martl and her daughter Nicole Sevik, for example, commemorate the victims in the Austrian “Gypsy detention camp” Weyer by reading short texts – apart from a series of 32 color slides, nothing remains of these people, deported to Poland in 1941. Jovan Nicolić comes from a Yugoslavian family of musicians and tells short stories about his childhood. The film also takes a critical look at the stereotypical portrayal of the minority in the history of film and the arts themselves, and is framed by an impressive concert by the Roma and Sinti Philharmonic Orchestra.

> Der offene Blick
> Zigeuner in Duisburg

Immigration laws make it difficult to accept them in Great Britain; right-wing demonstrators welcome them there with the slogan “Take them back”. The Federal Republic offers to take in up to 1000 people, but only 30 decide to leave for Germany. Sundaram accompanies two families to their new lives in Unna and Leverkusen. They experience solidarity and curiosity, but also racist prejudice. Sundaram ventures into the conflict zones: Former Aussiedler women agitate against Asian families, who in turn agitate against their former compatriots in Africa – in the end, everyone gets a voice, a plea for togetherness in a country of immigration emerges.

www.die-fuenfte-wand.de

The Spanish exclave bordering Morocco is a buffer zone: part of the EU, located on the African continent. Over several years, Sylvain George accompanies young men there in their everyday lives and in their unsuccessful attempts to cross the sea to Europe – the promise of a better life in the form of the Trasmediterranea ferries within reach. He follows the sometimes still minors as they frolic on the beach as well as when they negotiate the barbed wire fences. In impressively composed black-and-white images, ‘Nuit obscure’ shows the communal living of the men in homelessness, the daily struggle for survival, the frustration over repeatedly failed attempts to escape and the resignation that arises from the forced persistence. Sylvain George gets close to his protagonists in a respectful, at times tender way, and in surveying the place and the communities he finds moments of beauty again and again. An unsparing, observant look at the effects of European migration policy and at the same time a deeply humanistic film about the dream of freedom. (ek)

Produktionsfirma: www.alinafilm.com/nuit-eng
Interview

> Werkstattgespräch

For a long time, the family lived on a compound in Lehmstraße on the outskirts of Duisburg. Komers does not provide much commentary, he listens to the stories of the family members. In the end, the place is cleared, the inhabitants expelled … Awarded with the Prize of German Film Critics in Oberhausen in 1980. (rg)

With presentation of the book ‘Außen Fuji Tag’ by Rainer Komers, published in 2022 and dedicated to his diverse work (posters, typography, film, poetry).

*Note on the film’s title: Referring to Sinti*zze and Rom*nja with the G-word (also as a self-designation) was still a common practice in the 1980s, which we do not wish to reproduce. The film title and the remarks in the film itself are a historical document. We are showing the film because it is one of the first cinematic products in which Sinti*zze themselves have their say and report on their situation in Germany.

> Unrecht und Widerstand
> Der offene Blick

Beginning with a feature on the freedom fighter Subhas-Chandra Bose, who built up an Indian legion in fascist Germany, the program then jumps straight into the Indian election year 1980 and portrays the village of Beelba, on the basis of which social structures in the countryside and mechanisms of political opinion-forming are traced. The social and ecological effects of development aid are critically examined in ‘Help, the World Bank is Coming’. And in ‘Bhopal: Eight Years After’, the late effects of the poison gas disaster at the Union Carbide plant are shown. The reports for ‘Tagesthemen’ and ‘Weltspiegel’ shortly after the storming of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu nationalist fundamentalists are bring the program to an end and at the same time provide an outlook on today’s political situation in India, where the Hindu nationalist BJP has ruled since 2014.

www.die-fuenfte-wand.de

It attempts, as it says, “not to sketch a history as a chronological sequence of singular works,” but to span “the field of a documentary practice that resists the formatting of the visual, the national, and reality on multiple levels.” The 700-page book is the first attempt to comprehensively outline and interrogate documentary creation in Austria since the beginning of film funding in 1981.
During the book presentation Birgit Kohler will speak with Alejandro Bachmann about the “nuts & bolts” of the concrete work as well as about the theoretical discourses running through the book. In speaking, reading excerpts and brief glimpses of individual films, the genesis of the book in its concrete relation to the subject, the structures of its production and the difficulties of inclusion and exclusion (of films, artistic positions, discourses) will become comprehensible. At the same time, a more general question will be asked about the function of such publications: What interests are directed at books like this from different perspectives – the publisher’s, the filmmakers’, the critics’ – what role do they play in establishing (or questioning) the connection between an artistic form and an idea of “nation,” and how does writing about film relate to the films themselves?

Book
Alejandro Bachmann und Michelle Koch (Hg.): Österreich real: Dokumentarfilm 1981–2021, Verlag Filmarchiv Austria

In more than 160 cities across the country, people have joined the revolution. Their determination to overthrow this regime has withstood the brutality and repression of the repressive apparatus. So far, about 600 people have been killed and more than 90,000 imprisoned.
The regime counters the struggles for freedom, justice and democracy with brutal intimidation, increasingly out of sight from media and international attention: through detentions, rapes, torture and executions. But the protests continue.There is also extensive resistance in the arts and cultural scene, for example by rejecting norms that conform to the regime, boycotting state festivals and events, and participating in the protests. Numerous cultural workers are active in the revolution and have been affected by arrests, work bans and bans on leaving the country.
Iranian film history – both before and after the 1979 revolution – is a history of repression, discrimination, censorship, and one of squandering talent and potential. FLINTA* filmmakers, artists and actors in particular have been and continue to be affected by this. At the same time, Iranian film history is also full of the tireless struggle for political and artistic freedom at all levels. With the film selection for the documentary film week, we, the Woman* Life Freedom Collective Hamburg, would like to point out the different but strongly interconnected historical, political and gender-related aspects of these multi-layered struggles.

Film Program:

Mouvement de Libération des Femmes Iraniennes, Année Zéro.
Sylvina Boissonnas, Michelle Muller, Sylviane Rey, Claudine Mulard, IRN/F 1979, 12 min, Kurdish/Farsi/French OmeU
When Khomeini announced the compulsory veil for women on March 7, 1979, women and liberals demonstrated against it in the streets for days. Shortly before their expulsion, a team of four feminists recorded these events together with writer Kate Millett. The film not only gathers important testimonies of the feminist struggle, but also documents white feminism, Western cultural relativism, and the importance of recognising freedom as a universal value.

A Letter to My Mother
Amina Maher, D/IRN 2019, 19 min, Farsi/Engl./dt. OmeU
In this self-portrait, Amina Maher grapples with her experiences of violence in order to process them, find coping strategies, and make herself heard. Amina’s story is personal, but not an isolated case; she tells of sexualized violence, patriarchal structures and transphobia, also in Iran. And she speaks out radically for freedom, justice and tolerance.

Dancing for Change
Shahrzad Arshadi, CDN 2015, 50 min, Kurdish/Farsi OmeU
Since 1979, women have been living with their male comrades in the mountains of the southern Kurdish regions, organizing against the Iranian government. ‘Dancing for Change’ focuses on six Kurdish-Iranian women from three different generations who have joined the struggle against oppression by the Islamic Republic. The film shows their activism, their ideals and their vision of a better life.

About Woman* Life Freedom Hamburg
The transnational collective Woman* Life Freedom Hamburg is an independent group of activists, artists and students who have come together in support of the feminist revolution in Iran. They stand behind the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” (Kurdish), “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Farsi), translated to “Woman, Life, Freedom”, as they believe that a self-determined life in Iran is only possible through the realisation of freedom and social, ethnic, sexual and gender equality.

Between cooking, mowing the lawn and movie nights, they have nothing to do but wait: for mail from the authorities and the next call to move forward with the process of getting a residence permit. Raaed Al Kour and Anna-Maria Dutoit find expressive images of perseverance in their sensitive miniature and at the same time leave room for the protagonists’ inner lives to unfold in front of the camera. ‘I’tikaaf’ is a tender film that attentively portrays the dynamics in the communal cohabitation of three men and reveals the grueling procedure of asylum procedures. (ek)

Protokoll Duisburg

The chairman of their central council, Romani Rose, lost 13 relatives to the Nazis. Peter Nestler interweaves archive material with commentary and repeatedly lets Romani Rose have his say, recounting his family history and reflecting on his many years of experience as a civil rights activist.Nestler also made ‘Zigeuner sein’ in 1970, and his cinematographer Rainer Komers shot ‘Zigeuner in Duisburg’ in 1980. At that time, these were the first films that did not speak on behalf of the minority, but allowed Sinti and Roma to speak for themselves. Complementing the theme, we show Nestler’s ‘Der offene Blick’ (2021). (rg)

> Unrecht und Widerstand
> Zigeuner in Duisburg

Sometimes these markings disappear or overgrow, shifting boundaries, just as perspectives shift. In ‘Terra que marca’ this means opposing the anthropocentric view with a juxtaposition of large and small things, the antiquated and the present, human and non-human forms of life. The film is not interested in an idealisation of peasant life in the Portuguese hinterland. Instead, we see people during their constant hard work on the land, which always remains piecemeal. Through the adequate use of modest cinematic tools (mini DV, handheld camera), a poetics of subtlety emerges seemingly incidentally. (bs)

His sister Laure begins to make a film about him. The camera becomes accomplice to them both, a tool of their communication and a means of possible healing. Arnaud cooperates and argues with Laure, he sometimes defends himself, and he attacks. He is aware of the presence of the possible audience and the outside world, which may not understand him. But he does not abandon the camera with which he shares his thoughts and his daily life, even in times when he is separated from his sister. A highly emotional, very direct and highly watchable report that accompanies Arnaud on his journey and discovers with him worlds that may help him find what he has always wanted… (fb)

A bar of old communists telling stories. Today this is called oral history; in 1971 it was a cinematic act of solidarity. In October 1923, the pub landlord was one of the leaders of the uprising of Hamburg workers who no longer wanted to wait for the revolution and preferred to take their fate and gun into their own hands. They managed to occupy some police stations in Hamburg, but the uprising failed. Those who were arrested had to pay a high price …
At the beginning of the 1970s, the Wochenschau group formed around Klaus Wildenhahn at the Berlin Film Academy in order to reflect upon uprising filmically. We have already shown the classic once in 2009 as part of the Klaus Wildenhahn retrospective at the 6th dokumentarfilmwoche. (rg)

More than ten Hamburg groups, institutions and individuals have joined forces to commemorate the Hamburg Uprising one hundred years after the events. Rüdiger von Hanxleden from the group Children of the Resistance will introduce the event. Followed by a film discussion with Gisela Tuchtenhagen, collaborator and cinematographer of the film.

Events for the anniversary of the Hamburg uprising:

Presentation of the book project ›Two life stories in a century of extremes, two books about resistance against Nazism‹ (working title) in the Staatsbibliothek Hamburg, May 17 at 7 p.m

A series curated by Thomas Tode is planned for the Metropolis: »Hamburg 1923 in context« with unknown films about the Hamburg uprising, starting in September.

The Museum of Hamburg History is showing an exhibition about the Hamburg Uprising from September 20th.

Schiffbek in the Hamburg Uprising. The communist attempted coup in October 1923. Two-hour tour from the Kulturpalast Hamburg, October 22, 2 p.m

Growing up in secular post-independence India, Navina Sundaram describes herself as a “child of the Nehru era.” Later, as an NDR journalist, she reports on decolonization processes in the 70s, which she accompanies in solidarity. She made the film ‘As Long as There Are Tears’ about India’s political development since the founding of the state in 1947, traveled to Bangladesh shortly after its independence from Pakistan for ‘Freedom and Its Price’, reported on the transfer of the murdered freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral to Guinea-Bissau or from Western Sahara after the withdrawal of the Spanish troops for ‘Tagesschau’ and ‘Weltspiegel’. The theme day puts a spotlight on this period, which shaped Sundaram’s self-image as the “voice of the South” on German television.

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From then on he follows three women through their everyday life – before the Russian invasion. Hanna keeps a cow and describes herself as the saddest person in the world. When Maria is not distributing pensions in the village, she manages the post office – a place that brings the village together beyond letters and parcels. Nelya, on the other hand, wants to finish her PhD and is studying bats, bear droppings and beetles in the nearby national park. The world is small in Stuschyzja, but it is quite big within it. The closer the film gets to its protagonists, the more Maksym and his cameraman intervene in the events even in front of the camera. Hair is cut, a pig is given away, liquor is drunk. (sp)

In a congenial way, the film reflects and intertwines this continuity using different materials and cinematic methods. An off-text that comes across as anachronistic and historical prints evoke the exoticizing perspective of a 19th-century European explorer, which is successively countered by a montage of Porteiros’ (concierge and security guard rolled into one) inner monologues. “We are waiting for the right moment to break out of the frame,” is said, while one of the tableaux vivants abruptly sets into revolutionary motion. (bs)

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In long takes, we travel along the same streets and highways over and over again. The daily short call to the mother, one to the wife: the rituals of the commuter, through the seasons, mostly in the congestion of Melbourne’s rush hour. Occasionally, a younger work colleague (the filmmaker) accompanies the driver. Conversations develop, relationships take on contours. Against the background of the repetitive journeys, the corners, straights and exits of a life are first imperceptibly, then more clearly outlined in the conversations and telephone calls. A meditative cinematic experience that is becomes an event precisely in its reduction and casualness. (tg)

Security guards Daniel and Ammar are hired to make sure no one enters the area. They guard it day and night, stretching cordons. In the meantime, residents talk about their everyday lives. Legends and urban legends mix with personal stories and reflections and form a narrative that sleepwalks between documentation and fiction. Through encounters with the people of the area and the developing friendship between Daniel and Ammar, the territory opens up in a parable that questions our surveillance society: The river becomes a symbol of an uninhibited place, free of fear. (fb)