ZA 2017, D Penny Siopis, Print colour & b/w, digital, 10 min, engl. OV, Galerie Stevenson

The film revolves around „Skokiaan“, an illegal brew made by Africans during the colonial era. It was outlawed by the authorities, so the brew itself became a form of resistance. The homonymous jazz tune by August Msarurgwa was covered by Louis Armstrong, whose visit to Southern Africa in 1960 serves as one of many points of convergence that link political, cultural and personal narratives.

US 1983, D, SC, P Julie Dash, C Ahmed El Maanouni, E Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, M Eugene Bohlmann, Cast Lonette McKee, Rosanne Katon, Ned Bellamy, Jack Radar, Print b/w, 16mm, 34 min, engl. OV with german SUB, Women Make Movies, Academy Archive

The time is 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor; the place is National Studios, a fictitious Hollywood motion picture studio. Mignon Duprée, a Black woman studio executive who appears to be white and Ester Jeeter, an African American woman who is the singing voice for a white Hollywood star are forced to come to grips with a society that perpetuates false images as status quo. This highly-acclaimed drama by one of the leading African American women directors follows Mignon's dilemma, Ester's struggle and the use of cinema in wartime Hollywood: three illusions in conflict with reality. (Women Make Movies)

Fragment. DE 1932/33, D, SC, C, E Ella Bergmann-Michel, P Ella Bergmann-Michel, Paul Seligmann, Print b/w, 35mm, silent, 13 min, DFF - Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum

“The last film remained a fragment. There were shots of campaign posters, of lively street discussions, of typical followers of the various parties. Frankfurt’s streets and alleyways – already decorated with Nazi flags, hammers and sickles, and the familiar flag with the three arrows – were captured in the documentary. Then I had to break off filming for political reasons. That was in January 1933.” (Ella Bergmann-Michel, Meine Dokumentarfilme., Sprengel Museum Hannover, Inv. No. A 40. 04 – c – 01) After the police seizure and confiscation of the recently filmed footage, Ella Bergmann-Michel and Paul Seligmann decided to take the raw film material into exile in England to keep it from the Nazis

The camera’s searching look along the streetscape takes on an additional political edge. It lingers at advertising columns and studies their torn paper as visible signs of protest; it seeks out the exits of workplaces to observe employees. Puzzled, it registers ordinary gestures in threatening uniforms; it follows the gathering electorate, then remains standing behind a flagpole. The flâneur becomes a witness to the increasing crisis, to the evident grip of the future regime on daily life. She observes the perceptible acquiescence and self-fashioning of the majority of the population as well as the disappearing remnants of palpable resistance. She gathers evidence.

DE 2017, SPOTS zum Tribunal „NSU-Komplex auflösen!“, Print colour, DCP, 3 min, german OV with engl. SUB

A survey taken on the streets of Berlin: What forms of transport do neo-Nazis use? The woman moderating persistently suggests that they use bicycles, an idea considered completely absurd by those questioned. neo- For Germans it seems utterly inconceivable that a Nazi would ride a bike. The fact that the NSU terrorists who placed and ignited a nail bomb in front of the Yıldırım brothers’ hair salon on Keupstraße fled on bikes, as they did after robbing banks, does not seem to have gotten through to the public. During questioning in conjunction with the NSU trial, senior investigator Josef Wilfling, Head of the Munich Homicide Squad, said: “I have never seen a neo-Nazi on a bike.” (TOWERMMK, Weil ich nun mal hier lebe, 2018)

DE 2017, R Laura J. Padgett, Print colour & b/w, DCP from 16mm, 2 min, german OV with english SUB

SOLITAIRE is an impression, made from documentary film material and radio broadcasts of the late 1950s until 1972. It was culled exclusively from the Hessian Broadcasting Corporation’s (hr) archives. The film deals with the concept of democracy, of having a voice and the contiguity between private and public space. These boundaries, which are in the process of dissolving, are made clear by cinematic history and the idea of news reporting as fundamental strands of our social being. (Kasseler DOKFEST, 2018)

DE 2018, D Katrin Winkler, Print colour, digital, 15 min, engl. OV with german SUB

A research on the consequences and (in-)visibilities of genocide, apartheid and racism in Namibia, by looking closely at some of the recent commemorations to the genocide of the Herero and the Nama by German colonial powers between 1904 and 1908. The film combines the gaze of the camera lens on an old monument that marks Namibia ́s struggle for independence, with images of the H.E.S.S. telescopes that measure cosmic gamma rays. (Kasseler DOKFEST, 2019)