Dear All,
I would like to draw your attention to our forthcoming film season of documentaries from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, which starts next Tuesday with Romuald Karmakar's Hamburg Lectures. The season curator Birgit Kohler from Berlin as well as many of the filmmakers will be present for Q & A's.
Please find more information below of follow this link http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11557478v.htm
Kind regards,
Maren Hobein, Goethe-Institut London
PERFORMING DOCUMENTARY
TUE 19 – SAT 23 NOVEMBER 2013, GOETHE-INSTITUT LONDON
Running from 19 – 23 November 2013 at the Goethe-Institut London, Performing Documentary will present 9 films from Austria, Germany and Switzerland which experiment with different forms of performance to explore current issues such as women trafficking, restrictive immigration laws, economic crimes, or the penal system. Performing Documentary provides a chance to see these films, most of them UK premieres, in a discursive context provided by Q&A’s with the filmmakers as well as a closing panel discussion, hosted by Professor Stella Bruzzi, Warwick University, and including playwright Alecky Blythe (London Road), series curator Birgit Kohler (Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin), and the filmmakers Anja Salomonowitz and Volko Kamensky on 23 November.
Obvious reenactments, situations that are clearly contrived, alienation effects and performance sequences – all these are features of a strand of documentary film that has emerged in the past 10 years. Experimenting with formal elements that go against the grain of the standard notion of documentary, these films quite literally stage the researched documentary material. On the level of content these films deal with current social and political issues, while at the same time extending the repertoire of documentary practice on a formal level. Whether actors or the real protagonists (or puppets) meticulously present compiled testimonials theatrically or in a simple filmed reading, or whether they are recorded in the studio or on location, in each case established patterns of documentary representation are called into question. This approach reflects a clear distrust of both empathetic identification and the idea of alleged "documentary" evidence. The focus is less on intimacy, authenticity and immediacy than on the analysis of social structures. Emotion is replaced by restraint, illustration gives way to reduction and abstraction. Daring to experiment, these performative political documentaries challenge both documentary strategies and the current state of society.
Performing Documentary is a collaboration between the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin, the Austrian Cultural Forum London, the Embassy of Switzerland in the United Kingdom and the Goethe-Institut London.
PERFORMING DOCUMENTARY
Tuesday 19 - Saturday 23 November 2013, Goethe-Institut London
50 Princes Gate, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PH TICKETS £3 Individual Film; £5 Double Bill; Panel Discussion (23 Nov): free; £20 Season Ticket; free for Goethe-Institut Language Students and Library Members. Booking Essential.
BOOKING & CONTACT [log in to unmask] or +44 20 75964000
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Contact Details:
Maren Hobein, Project Coordinator for Film: [log in to unmask] Jennifer Calleja, Press & Public Relations: [log in to unmask]
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http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11557478v.htm
SEASON SUMMARY
The season kicks off with Romuald Karmakar’s ambitious Hamburg Lectures (2006), in which an actor’s detached reading aloud of two sermons given by Imam Mohammed Fazazi in January 2001 in a Hamburg mosque (attended by some of the September 11th terrorists) enables us, as did Karmakar’s earlier Himmler Project (2000), to detect and follow the texts’ underlying totalitarian ideas. Similarly stripped down and minimalist, The Kick (2006) by Andres Veiel (Black Box BRD, If Not Us, Who?) confronts us with two actors on a stage expressing the views of 18 real-life characters connected to the brutal murder of a 16-year-old youth.
In Tina Leisch’s Gangster Girls (2008) women serving time in prison turn into actors playing themselves and reenacting their daily lives, whereas in It Happened Just Before (2005) by Anja Salomonowitz, five non-actors, are seen in their real life, yet unreal-looking daily contexts speaking the words of victims of human trafficking.
In Negotiating Love (2012) by Calle Overweg, real-life therapists meet actors in staged therapy sessions complemented by domestic scenes giving an unusual insight in the various problems couples face. Couples, though involuntarily separated ones, are also the subject matter of Anja Salomonowitz’s film The 727 Days without Karamo (2013) about the painful effects of restrictive immigration laws on relationships. And just one couple is at the centre of Peter Liechi’s Father’s Garden – The Love of My Parents (2013), in which the director’s parents make repeated appearances as rabbit-shaped puppets.
Taking us from the private sphere to the work place, Stefan Landorf’s Meeting (2009) highlights the standardised language, behaviour and architectural setting of today’s ritualistic work encounters. Unlike the other films in the series, Oral History (2009) by Volko Kamensky and Thomas Fürhapter’s Michael Berger - A Hysteria (2010) both focus on locations and play with the relation between image and the disembodied voice-over to reveal stereotypical concepts of the idyllic and to follow the life trajectory of a real-life financial fraudster respectively.
SCREENING SCHEDULE
Hamburg Lectures (Dir. Romuald Karmakar) TUE 19 NOV 7PM In a studio setting – neutral background, stool, side table and lighting – actor Manfred Zapatka reads a text in a sober and measured tone, only raising his voice slightly from time to time. He doesn’t make the words his own, but simply allows them to pass his lips. The texts consist of two sermons given by Imam Mohammed Fazazi in a Hamburg mosque in January 2001. It is only the anti-illusionistic, highly understated set-up of the film and its specific apparatus of distance that enable attention to be focused on the texts themselves, allowing their internal logic, the rhetorical strategies of the Koran exegesis being employed and the structures of the totalitarian thought model they are rooted in to be grasped.
Hamburg Lectures can be seen as part of Romuald Karmakar’s installation and as part of the German contribution to the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2013.
Germany 2006, colour, 134mins, with English subtitles. Written and directed by Romuald Karmakar. With Manfred Zapatka.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11710517v.htm
It Happened Just Before (Dir. Anja Salomonowitz) - UK Premiere WED 20 NOV 6.30PM Five people, five potential "crime scenes": a customs officer, a waiter working at a brothel, the woman from round the corner, a diplomat and a taxi driver, each of them in their daily surroundings, tell of frustrated hopes, false promises, exploitation and helplessness. Although it is obvious that the situations are staged and that they themselves have not actually experienced the events described, the things they are talking about did actually happen: the texts they each deliver in a flat monotone voice were put together based on written records of meetings held with women affected by trafficking, who do not appear themselves. The alienation effect that emerges due to this interweaving of documentary material and explicit staging challenges narrative conventions, documentary strategies and the state of society in equal measure. Caligari Award, Berlin International Film Festival 2007, Vienna Film Award, Viennale 2006.
Austria 2005, colour, 72mins, with English subtitles, Written and directed by Anja Salomonowitz.
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with Anja Salomonowitz.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11706726v.htm
Gangster Girls (Dir. Tina Leisch)
WED 20 NOV 8.30PM
Artfully made-up faces, wigs, songs, acting and dance – a theater workshop in women’s prison Schwarzau. The film tells the dramatic life stories of the women serving time there, showing them reenacting their everyday lives and portraying themselves. They also describe how they got into prison and what experiences they have had behind bars in a series of staged discussion scenes in the kitchen, the laundry and sewing room. Their faces remain masked in these scenes, much like they are in the rest of the film, making the women seem almost like artificial figures. As acting and confession and staged reflection and authentic experience run into one another, a multilayered, contradictory picture of the institution of the prison and the society from which it has emerged is revealed.
Austria 2008, colour, 79mins, with English subtitles. Written and directed by Tina Leisch.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Tina Leisch.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11706650v.htm
Father's Garden. The Love Of My Parents (Dir. Peter Liechti) - UK Premiere THU 21 NOV 6.20PM The father tends his large garden with the utmost precision. The mother irons shirts and regrets that the father never wears T-shirts. The father likes order, always knows best, and has everything under control. The mother prays and talks of her loneliness. The two are fundamentally different, have opposing views and interests, and have been married for 62 years. Closely knit yet poles apart: this is the ambivalent standpoint from which Peter Liechti turns his lens on his elderly parents and the story of their marriage. Alongside conversations that shift from slapstick to insanity and observations of daily life in his parents’ cramped, lower middle class apartment, a puppet theatre is also established as a second location. This forms the stage for scenes between mother and father to be reenacted by rabbit puppets; as a puppet, the son can also react in explosive fashion. Wild sound effects and music provide an additional level of commentary, generating disorder, disharmony, and distance. Drawing on real biographies, this deeply personal film transcends the private to convey the tenor of life and sense of self of a generation from a bygone era: unsentimental yet full of empathy.
Switzerland 2013, colour, 93min, with English subtitles. Written and directed by Peter Liechti.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11706730v.htm
Negotiating Love (Dir. Calle Overweg) - UK Premiere THU 21 NOV 8.45PM Three couples in crisis each seek advice at therapy sessions and argue over infidelities, abortion and separate bedrooms. Accusations, fears and traumas all come up, with separation very much on the cards. These case studies reveal areas of conflict, structures and relationship patterns all of a universal nature. A film that portrays the efforts needed to preserve love and relationships as a work in progress. A set-up whereby therapy sessions are held in the sober atmosphere of a studio. The problems being negotiated are standard ones. The clients are played by actors, the therapists work in the field in real life and are not playing a role. These sessions are supplemented by scenes staged with minimal decor from the everyday lives of the various couples in line with the epic theatre tradition as well as workshop discussions in which the therapists relate their practices to the film team. Documentary elements and improvised acting are combined in distinctive fashion, creating a variation on the documentary which works with abstraction and fiction and is unconcerned with authenticity. Resembling nothing so much as a public experiment, this artificial set-up yields touching moments full of emotion.
Germany2012, colour, 85mins, with English subtitles. Written and directed by Calle Overweg. With Leopold Altenburg, Abak Safaei-Rad, Axel Hartwig, Anja Haverland, Gerhold Selle, Franziska Kleinert, Marion Braun, Heidemarie Zunken-Kreplien, Joachim Maier.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Calle Overweg.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11706878v.htm
The Kick (Dir. Andres Veiel)
FRI 22 NOV 6.20PM
16-year-old Marinus Schöberl was brutally attacked and killed by Marco and Marcel Schönfeld and their friend Sebastian Fink in Potzlow, a village in Brandenburg, in the summer of 2002. Following months of research in the village, a play entitled ‘The Kick’ and a documentary of the same name were created, the latter becoming a dense cinematic protocol consisting of two actors playing 18 different roles that largely consist of monologues. The roles include parents and children, the perpetrators themselves and the victim's relatives, the mayor, the priest as well as officials and lawyers. The film represents an attempt to portray the inconceivable, to emphasise the non-representable nature of such a monstrous act by means of formal asceticism and to explore the structures that underlie the act in question. A polyphonic narrative, which simultaneously abstracts from the deed and calls it back into the present. Best Documentary, Visions du Réel Nyon 2006
Germany 2006, colour (35mm), 85mins, with English subtitles. Written and directed by Andres Veiel. With Susanne-Marie Wrage, Markus Lerch.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Andres Veiel.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11710465v.htm
Oral History (Dir. Volko Kamensky) &
A Hysteria - Michael Berger (Dir. Thomas Fürhapter) FRI 22 NOV 8.45PM - UK Premieres
Oral History - Volko Kamensky - UK Premiere Birdsong, a deciduous forest, a small collection of houses with not a person to be seen. It all feels like a fairy tale. Slow tracking shots. The sound of a telephone ringing. An ecstatic voiceover spoken by various female voices talks about a place at the edge of a forest, about home and community, about living close to nature and exclusion. “I was born here, this is where I belong”. Gentle doubts begin to arise about the relationship between the voiceover and the images. It will be seen that the allegedly autobiographical stories being related by the staff of a telephone hotline about "the village on the edge of the forest" are entirely made up. Made-up stories as a form of documentary material that refers to something real: the tangible reality of stereotypical collective ideas.
Germany 2012, colour (35mm), 23mins, with English subtitles. Written and directed by Volko Kamensky.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11706903v.htm
A Hysteria - Michael Berger (Dir. Thomas Fürhapter) - UK Premiere The incredible biography of young Austrian investment banker Michael Berger, tracing how he went from a bank apprentice in Salzburg to a corrupt Wall Street millionaire, moving from the list of the most successful Austrians abroad to the America's Most Wanted list. As a voiceover relates Michael Berger's life story in the clinical style of a protocol, mixing acts and anecdotes at will, Berger never becomes anything more than a phantom, just as the discussions never go beyond speculation. Not a single image of him is shown, just the places that he affected. As the film follows the trail of the criminal, the objectivising form employed means that it is the inscrutable nature of the criminal system that ultimately comes to the fore.
Austria 2010, colour, 50mins, with English subtitles. Written and directed by Thomas Fürhapter. With Paul Kraker, Joe Remick.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Volko Kamensky and Thomas Fürhapter.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11706954v.htm
Meeting (Dir. Stefan Landorf) - UK Premiere SAT 23 NOV 3.30PM Meetings, conferences and talks are part of everyday life in the modern world of work, all of them employing their own linguistic codes and rules of conduct, which create an image of the actual state of the company. The film shows meetings in a wide range of different institutions, placing its focus on the architecture of meeting rooms and the language and gestures of the participants in particular. It leads us into a world of small talk, phrases and rituals and reveals meetings as a stage for (self-) portrayals of all kinds. This becomes most tangible in the performative sequences, in which individual sentences are repeated by the protagonists and then taken up and recited by actors as they move the stage sets around – verbal fragments to be employed at will, liberated of any particular meaning.
Germany 2009, colour (35mm), 82mins., with English subtitles. Written and directed by Stefan Landorf. With Anne-Marja Lützkendorf, Kerstin Peupelmann, Matthias Pick, Albrecht Abraham Schuch, Juliane Spaniel.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Stefan Landorf.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11710493v.htm
The 727 Days Without Karamo (Dir. Anja Salomonowitz) - UK Premiere SAT 23 NOV 5.45PM An Austrian woman has been forced to live alone with her children ever since her husband Karamo was deported to Africa. A man tries to instill hope in his Chinese wife that she will soon be allowed to return to Vienna. Others talk of the long wait for residency permits, of struggles with forms and offices, of German courses, income statements and domestic spot checks by the police which infer that their marriage is a sham. The complicated, state regulated reality experienced by various bi-national couples forms the basis for this formally unusual political documentary. Each protagonist appears just once, presenting his or her experiences in a clearly staged manner within highly stylised settings. Both their costumes and the locations they appear in are presented in shades of yellow throughout, with sound collages and fictionalising music representing a further creative intervention on the acoustic level. With the colour yellow serving as a linking mechanism, the various personal contributions form themselves into a fluid documentary account of the confrontation between love and restrictive immigration law. It is a story of madness with method.
Austria 2013, colour, 80mins, with English subtitles. Written and directed by Anja Salomonowitz. With Zora Bachmann, Osas Imafidon, Evelyn Barota, Mutono Barota, Samuel Barota, Johanna Bauer, Daniel Inyinbor, Emmanuel Osaiwe Inyinbor, David Akowe Inyinbor, Zou Joeying Brichta, Adolf Brichta, Susanna Buchacher. Silver Eye Award for Best Feature-length Doucmentary, Jihlava International Film Festival, Institute of Documentary Film.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Anja Salomonowitz.
http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en11710508v.htm
Panel Discussion
SAT 23 NOV 7.45PM
An extended panel discussion will further explore the purpose, potential and problems of the various strategies the films employ and their relation to theatre and performance.
The panel will comprise of –
Alecky Blythe is playwright and screenwriter known for her use of ‘Recorded Delivery’, which is also the name of the theatre company she set up in 2003 and a term that has become synonymous with verbatim theatre. Her musical London Road opened at the National Theatre's Cottesloe Theatre in London in 2011, and is now adapted for the screen by her.
http://www.recordeddelivery.net/
Birgit Kohler is Co-director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin and member of the selection committee for the International Forum of New Cinema of the Berlin Film Festival. She is also a film scholar and a film curator, her curatorial projects focussing on current documentary and international film, including C. Akerman, R. Depardon, B. Mendoza, A. Weerasethakul and Performing Documentary. She is the editor of Performing Documentary, Jean Eustache, and 1968 // 2008 – 40 Years of May ’68 and Film.
http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/home.html
Volko Kamensky explores the creation of myths, the visualisations of the imagination and stereotypes of shared memory in a formally distinctive manner, often underscoring the conflicting relationship between image and sound. He is co-editor with Julian Rohrhuber of Ton. Texte zur Akustik im Dokumentarfilm (Sound. Texts on Acoustics in Documentary Film, 2013). He lives in Hamburg.
http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/calendar/single-view/calendar/2011/november/02/article/3034/3004.html
Anja Salomonowitz has developed a style of filmmaking that oscillates between documentary and fictional narrative and uses obvious stylisation, as for example in her use of settings and colour. Her films pursue specific demands regarding current social and political issues such as trafficking and immigration laws. She lives in Vienna.
http://www.anjasalomonowitz.com/
The panel discussion will be moderated by Stella Bruzzi, Professor of Film & Television Studies, Warwick University, the author of New Documentary (2000 & 2006) and most recently Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-scene in Hollywood (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). She is currently engaged in research and writing stemming from a Leverhulme Major Research Project: ‘Approximation: Documentary, History and the Staging of Reality’ (2011—13).
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/staff/bruzzi/
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