One point of departure for our programming focus on "generations" at Remake was a change of personnel at Kinothek Asta Nielsen: the fifth festival edition is the first which we have organised since the departure of Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann from their roles at the Kinothek. Consequently, the topic has been a part of our everyday work lives over the past years, just as the Kinothek's collecting activities have been increasingly devoted to taking on archival materials from our older generations.

Another source of inspiration in determining this year's theme was the work of Georgian filmmaker Lana Gogoberidze, who took part in the 2019 edition of Remake. Filmmaking has followed a matrilinear logic in her family, for three whole generations now. Her mother, Nutsa Gogoberidze (1902−1966), was Georgia's first female director, while Salomé Alexi, Lana Gogoberidze's daughter, has also become a filmmaker.

We are screening Gogoberidze's most recent documentary film, which was co-authored with her daughter – MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, OR THE NIGHT IS NEVER COMPLETE (GEO, FR 2023) – alongside further films from the Gogoberidze dynasty. We encounter mother-daughter relationships in the scope of multiple programs: Park Soo-nam and Park Maeui work together to save Park Soo-nam's rich decolonial film archive (THE VOICES OF THE SILENCED, JP, KOR 2023); with her activist work, Carmen Spitta continues that of her mother, the Sinti civil rights activist Melanie Spitta, and will be speaking about the films of Melanie Spitta and Kathrin Seybold together with other guests. In this regard, the radical decision made by Afro-American artist and filmmaker Camille Billops represents a sort of antithesis: "I unmothered myself." FINDING CHRISTA (USA 1991) problematises traditional family models and relationships and makes the case for a democratisation of care work. At the same time, Billops' film work reflects the generationally destructive aftermath of slavery.

Intergenerational perspectives on movement and community history – remembering together – are also part of "Where we're coming from, where we're going". With films and discussions, we are devoting our attention to Aids activism in the 1980s and '90s, the self-organising efforts of Southeast Asian women in the West Germany and, across the festival's sections, feminist film festival work in the context of repressive political conditions.

However, we mustn’t forget to indulge and linger a while in certain emotional states and phases of life too, in the drifting along and the growing: in youth (MORAL, PHL 1982), in old age (THE LADY FROM CONSTANTINOPLE, HU 1969), or passionately in love in the period piece DESERT HEARTS (USA 1985), which tells a lesbian love story set in the USA of the late-1950s.

"Where we come from, where we're going" means intricate cross-generational relationships, no linear order, no simple continuity or discontinuity, but instead complex relationships of "negotiation, repetition, appropriation and reinvention" (Victoria Browne); filmic, feminist, queer and, yes, cross-generational linkages of gazes and desires in and through films, shared struggles, mutual care and reference, the longing for feminist "ancestors" and the hope for the communities, women*, films and festivals to come.

Gaby Babić

After training in photography at the Lette Verein in Berlin, Gisela Tuchtenhagen became one of the first women to study at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) in 1968. In keeping with the main theme of this year's edition of Remake, her work also deals with intergenerational relationships. We dedicate a retrospective to the documentary filmmaker and cinematographer by showcasing a cross-section of her extensive work.

In the five-part documentary series HEIMKINDER (1985–86), she accompanies an unusual group of travellers that consists of young offenders and their caretakers (we present parts 2 and 4). Gisela Tuchtenhagen describes her documentary approach as fostering the affection of her subjects, which allows them to feel comfortable and to open up in front of the camera. She in turn becomes the protagonist of the documentary ZUNEIGUNG ("Affection", 2006) by Quinka Stöhr, who met Gisela Tuchtenhagen and Klaus Wildenhahn at a summer course at the Academy of Arts. The directing duo and former couple have collaborated on numerous important documentary films. We screen one of their later works: FREIER FALL: JOHANNA K. (1992), a sensitive portrait of two trans women in the early 1990s.

Though she has never particularly emphasised it, Gisela Tuchtenhagen's work is deeply committed to the women's movement. Her camera work has previously been on display at the Remake Festival, with the films FÜR FRAUEN – 1. KAPITEL (1971) by Cristina Perincioli and EKMEK PARASI (1994) by Serap Berrakkarasu. This time around, we screen an NDR report by Barbara Schönfeldt, on which Gisela Tuchtenhagen was the cinematographer. In it, a team of women documents fault lines in the German women's movement at the second Hamburg Women's Week – through the perspective of migrant women. We pair WAS WISSEN WIR SCHON VON DENEN? (1982) with one of Tuchtenhagen's first directorial works, the newsreel IM AUFTRAG DER ARBEITERBEWEGUNG (1970), produced in the context of the DFFB, about strike mobilisation and media strategy in Italy. This important document of the early phase of politicisation at the film academy represents one of Tuchtenhagen's main themes. In SING IRIS, SING – FRAUEN LERNEN MÄNNERBERUFE (1978), her first directorial work without Wildenhahn, she accompanies the first retraining project for unemployed women in West Germany, with Monika Held at the microphone.

The second double programme includes VIOLETTA CLEAN (1988) about a self-managed addiction therapy programme for young women, also the first of its kind in West Germany. Produced by Hessischer Rundfunk, the film was also intended to be used for educational purposes in social institutions, according to directors Gerda E. Grossmann and Margit Eschenbach. DONNERSTAG NACHMITTAG – TREFFPUNKT INSEL (2005) was created primarily for the people with disabilities who were involved, then as now, in the film and in the independent living organisation "Selbstbestimmt Leben".

Fiona Berg, Borjana Gaković

"Where we come from…" – Remake honours the memory of earlier feminist film festivals and initiatives: the Women's Event ’72 of Edinburgh IFFF, KIWI – Kino Women International (1987–90), the histories of the founding of Feminale (Cologne, 1984) and femme totale (Dortmund, 1987) and, finally, in the scope of the previous festival edition, the distribution company CHAOS FILM, in connection with a tribute to film worker Hildegard Westbeld.

Hildegard's work, the archive which she built up over multiple decades and which has since been incorporated into Kinothek Asta Nielsen, was one of the departure points for this year's tribute. It honours the oppositional film workers of the Minsk-based Studio Tatyana. In 1991, camerawoman Tatyana Loginova and screenwriters/directors Ella Milova and Irina Pismennaya founded the first and only "independent women's film and video studio" within the former USSR. The International Women's Film Festival, the very first of its kind in Eastern Europe, developed into the studio's most widely known project. It was established the same year the studio was founded in Minsk and took place biennially until 1999. Hildegard Westbeld became part of the festival's organisational team – her archive contains a wealth of materials related to the festival and the studio itself. This is also the case for a report by camerawoman and filmmaker Julia Kunert from 1997 that sums up the significance of the festival succinctly: "The freedom of the press guaranteed by the constitution operates within the framework of censorship. In the brief descriptions of the films in the catalogue, subject matter such as Jewish culture, Aids, homosexuality, the mafia or political resistance is hidden behind euphemisms such as 'a family fate', 'tragic death', 'identity' or 'conflict'. What you can't read in the catalogue is playing on the screen though. And that's what counts."

The founding of the studio was a remarkable act in many regards. Not only had it devoted itself to the marginalised film work of women at a time when an independent Belarus was struggling with an economic crisis and the state-run film production structures had collapsed – it also represented a head-on challenge to the increasing political repression. The studio's research-intensive film works are unique sources of unofficial Belarusian historiography. Studio Tatyana's circle of friends included the future Nobel Prize winner for literature, Svetlana Alexievich, in Germany, in addition to Hildegard Westbeld, filmmakers Helke Sander and Claudia von Alemann among others, in Switzerland Veronika Minder…

The collective's film-cultural/political work came to an end in 2003: Alexander Lukashenka – in power since 1994 – ordered that the studio be shut down.

Among other works, the tribute features the documentary film ORANGE VESTS, which Remake previously recontextualised in co-operation with goEast Film Festival in 2022, now in a new, digitally restored version realised in co-operation with Deutsche Kinemathek. A discussion revisits the lives and legacy of the film workers in and around the Minsk studio, and the Remake publication assembles texts and materials related to the studio's history.

(Gaby Babić)