pong film GmbH

Germany, India 2026, 105 min
by Madhusree Dutta

Spurred by her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother’s strange evocation of home-invading tigers, filmmaker Madhusree Dutta travels to Assam, India. Here, she learns about the Flying Tigers: US aircraft that transferred military supplies during WWII across the perilous Himalayas, from Assam to Kunming in China. So begins a globetrotting, decades-spanning docufiction essay on the human-scale experience of monumental logistical phenomena, featuring small histories that unfold in the quiet shadows of History writ large. Teaming up with Kunming-born media theorist Mi You and Assam-based researcher Purav Goswami, Dutta contrasts the smooth international flow of goods today with increasing restrictions on people’s movement across borders. Her film reveals how lived realities of frontier populations have always been fluid and malleable, refusing the homogeneity demanded by cartographic political imagination. Appropriately, Dutta adopts a heterogeneous, genre-defying form, mixing interviews, archival material, performances, animation and musical numbers to craft a personal, wide-ranging work at once intimate and colossal. Source of Synopsis

Germany 2023, 64 min
by Khaled Abdulwahed

A photo camera is cleaned. Click. The shutter works. Bright light. A crackle and hiss in the sound. A broken "Hello?" opens a conversation between Khaled Abdulwahed, a Syrian filmmaker living in Leipzig, and his father in Aleppo. The son reconstructs his father's journey, arriving in the GDR as an exchange student in 1956. His son applies for asylum more than 60 years later as a refugee. The civil war in Syria separates their stories, the film BACKGROUND brings them back together and continues them.

Germany 2022, 39 min
by Mareike Bernien, Alex Gerbaulet

A the village edge runs a gravel path, through fields and up to the fence, charted on the map of former uranium mining sites in Saxony and Thuringia. From 1946 to 1990 the Soviet corporation SAG Wismut mined uranium there for the USSR's atomic weapons program. Above, socialism radiates into the future, below, an ancient rock radiates out of the torn up earth. The GDR environmental movement shines a light on the path. Night. Darkness. A group of people, a flashlight, a strip of x-ray film is buried in the gravel. The ground exposes the film, leaving behind a trace of its invisible rays.

Germany, France 2022, 105 min
by Philip Scheffner

A bus stop, a town square, a few blocks of houses in the suburb of a small French town, in Chatellerault. Zohra Hamadi, an Algerian citizen, can stand upright thanks to several metal rods, and now seems free of her debilitating scoliosis – the very reason for her immigration to France. By a twist of fate, this same recovery leads to her residence permit being revoked by the French State: she must consequently disappear, become invisible and inaudible. Choosing to make what he describes as State-coerced fiction, Philip Scheffner (to whom an Atelier was dedicated in 2018) abandons the documentary project he had begun and invents a scenario and a form to convey the violence and absurdity of this situation: Rhim Ibrir – whose story this is, and who had already taken part in one of the filmmaker’s previous films, Havarie – plays the main role, drawing from her own traumas. Via a simple and ingenious device that consists in particular of isolating the protagonist in the frame, the German filmmaker delivers a powerful political film. [VdR, Émilie Bujès]with: Rhim Ibrir, Thierry Cantin, Didier Cuillierier, Khadra Bekkouche, Nouria Lakhrissi, Sadya Bekkouche, Hassane Ziani, Zoulikha Ibrir

Germany 2020, 67 min
by Khaled Abdulwahed, Amel Alzakout

“I see everything,” she says, as if it was a curse. Brilliant sunshine, clear blue skies. The sea is calm, framed by a piece of railing. Buzzing voices. A peaceful moment if it weren’t for the fact that the sea is standing upright, vertical, like a waterfall. A rush of images, twirling, upside down, jolting. People in the boat, in the water, screams, life jackets, emergency whistles. Fluorescent orange, geometrical shapes cast by the sun.There’s no horizon any more, no sky, no up or down, only deepness and nothing to hold on to. Even Eme’s flow comes to a halt, contracting into the brutal present. She is filming and speaking. To him, to herself, to us, perhaps. Floating legs in sweat pants, jeans, thronged together. A blouse with butterflies, it looks like their wings are flapping in the water. The snake-like belt of a coat, a crumpled-up plastic cup, a pack of cigarettes. Fuck you all! She speaks, she rages, and she films to beat being tired, being cold, the fact that help isn’t coming. To beat dying, just for something to remain.

Germany 2018, 17 min
by Alex Gerbaulet

Two newspaper articles, ten years apart, two different women, the same wording. In 2001 the “Göttinger Zeitung” wrote that Margit (69) had lived a secluded life as an inconspicuous woman. In 2011 the “Hamburger Abendblatt” stated that Irina (65) had lived in seclusion, a non-descript woman. Up to the moment of their appearance in these newspaper lines, both women were invisible, forcefully concealed by their roles as wives and homemakers. Only for a brief moment did they claim visibility. Through acts of violence.The short film The Sleeper reconstructs and imagines the stories of these two women who were extrinsically determined throughout their lives, struggling to express themselves in vain until the only way for them to end the spiral of every-day violence was to resort to violence themselves. The cinematic narrative, too, oscillates between documentation and fiction. Everyday scenes, translated into animated still lives in the film, suggest that something is about to happen or just took place. The character of the homemaker seems omnipresent though she never appears on the scene, just as the actual protagonists Margit and Irina remain invisible.

2018, 26 min
by Khaled Abdulwahed

The experimental short film deconstructs and reconstructs a photograph taken in 1998 of a Syrian cactus field, a plant known for its resilience. War and its havoc have been there. 20 years later there only remains this photograph projected on a wall in a flat in a Berlin backyard.In autumn 1998, near his home in the southwest of Damascus, Khaled Abdulwahed took a landscape photograph of a cactus field on a 35mm chrome film. The old cactus fields in that area link the city with the countryside. Cacti grow all over the Middle East and are used for their fruits and as borders between houses and villages. The thorny, tough plant is also a symbol of resilience. The cactus field in Khaled’s film “backyard” consisted of 500,000 square-yards that belonged to farmers, who used to sell their cacP fruits every summer in the streets of Damascus. In the summer of 2012, the cactus fields were destroyed during the uprising, and the war started to form a new landscape. Khaled's picture on the film was damaged and lost, but he still had a scan of the photography-film. A silhouette of a camera stands in front of the copied picture that is projected on a wall. The silhouette of Khaled’s head moves behind the camera, checks the frame, we hear his breathing, the camera’s clicking. Khaled searches for the picture on the negative strip, cuts the negative, focuses, zooms, scans and develops. Helicopters, bulldozers, tanks, soldiers, fire and ash hit the cactus field. The picture is being erased. Piece by piece, Khaled carefully reconstructs the photograph’s viewpoint with a pen and a circle, he re-develops his picture. Following the cactus field’s forceful deformation and the deformation of the cactus field’s picture, the battles between original and copy, reality and image, he modifies, overwrites, adapts his memory.

Germany 2016, 94 min
by Philip Scheffner, Colorado Velcu

AND-EK GHES... – ONE FINE DAY... is the refrain of the title song in which a young man promises hisbeloved a future in Berlin if her love is only strong enough to follow him. The song was written by Colorado Velcu, charismatic multi-talent, single parent to seven children; heart, motor and chronicler of an extended family from Fat˛a Luncii in Romania.AND-EK GHES… continues an extraordinary collaboration based on the trust and friendship between the co-directors Philip Scheffner and Colorado Velcu.It began with the film REVISION (Berlinale, Forum 2012): The attempt to establish a common cinematic space between protagonists, filmmakers and the audience has now, three years since, been enlarged. The camera duplicates itself; besides the filmmaker’s, there are one, two, three cameras that wander from hand to hand. And not just the filmmaker, even we are allowed into a world in which humour, chutzpah and solidarity stand against poverty and exclusion. In which the Velcus, contrary to all ascriptions, reinvent themselves time and again. In which Berlin begins to glow in the shimmering colours of Bollywood. A world in which reality and fiction are sometimes only a laugh apart.

2016, 94 min
by Philip Scheffner

The coordinates 37°28.6'N and 0°3.8'E mark a point in the Mediterranean – 38 nautical miles from the port city Cartagena in Spain or 100 nautical miles from the Algerian port city Oran – depending on the narrator’s perspective. Observing the sea from this point, the whole world is water, sky and boundless horizon. A 'sea of possibilities', charged with the hopes, fears and dreams of the voyagers.On 14th September 2012 at 2:56pm, using these coordinates, the cruise liner 'Adventure of the Seas' reports to the Spanish Maritime Rescue Centre the sighting of a dinghy adrift with 13 persons on board.Visual contact.90 minutes.Waving.Waiting.The radio traffic between the cruise liner, the Cartagena port authorities, the rescue cruiser 'Salvamar Mimosa' and the helicopter 'Helimer 211' structures the soundscape of the film. Visually, the cinematic space contracts to a single, unedited sequence arching over the total duration of the film. It is a short YouTube clip which seems today as the very essence, the condensation of the situation in the Mediterranean. In single frames, the dinghy with 13 figures on board becomes an icon of the daily news images. We are forced to watch. From the recordings with tourists and officers of the cruise liner, with the crew of a container ship, with the Harraga, les bruleurs – “who burn their passports”, and their families the biographic traces of the documentary material are extended into a cinematic imagination. A choreography emerges reflecting the past, present and future of the voyagers: Will another, a new potential space become visible when they meet again in a cinematic space?

Germany 2012, 106 min
by Philip Scheffner

On June 29th, 1992 a farmer discovers two bodies in a corn field in the North East of Germany. Police enqiries lead to the fact that the dead men are Romanian citizens. During the attempt to cross the EU border, they have been shot by hunters. The hunters claim that they had mistaken the people for wild boar. Four years later, the trial begins. It will never be proved, which of the hunters has fired the fatal bullet. The verdict: not guilty. German Press Agency dpa reports: 'From Romania, noone has arrived for the rendition of judgement.' The police files contain the names and adress of Grigore Velcu and Eudache Calderar. However, their families never even got to know, that a trial had been held. With REVISION, a legally terminated crime case becomes the subject of a cinematic revision. Places, individuals, and memories are being connected, and form a fragile pattern from different versions and perspectives of contemporary European history.

Germany 2010, 100 min
by Philip Scheffner

DAY OF THE SPARROW is a political wildlife documentary. It tells the story of a country where theborder between war and peace is disappearing. On November 14th , 2005 a sparrow is shot dead in Leeuwarden, and in Kabul a German soldier dies. These competing headlines are the starting point for director Philip Scheffner, to trace the war using the methods of an ornithologist. On his journey through Germany, the camera circuits a reality of the war – by capturing images of apparent peace.Dialogue fragments are wafting through deserted landscapes. Birds remain in the focus, becoming our guides to hidden places where the war is produced. And then, a sudden change of perspective: An arrest takes place on a Brandenburg country lane. The birdwatchers themselves become the targets of observation.

2007, 87 min
by Philip Scheffner

"There once was a man.This man came into the European war.Germany captured this man.He wishes to return to India.If God has mercy, he will make peace soon.This man will go away from here."Mall Singh's crackling words are heard as he spoke into the phonographic funnel on 11th December 1916 in the city of Wünsdorf, near Berlin.90 years later, Mall Singh is a number on an old Shellac record in an archive - one amongst hundreds of voices of colonial soldiers of the First World War.The recordings were produced as the result of an unique alliance between the military, the scientific community and the entertainment industry. In his experimental search "The Halfmoon Files", Philip Scheffner follows the traces of these voices to the origin of their recording. Like a memory game - which remains incomplete right until the end - he uncovers pictures and sounds that revive the ghosts of the past. His protagonists' words intersect along the concentric spirals the story follows. Those who pressed the record button on the phonographs, on photo and film cameras, were the ones to write official history.Mall Singh and the other prisoners of war of the Halfmoon Camp disappeared from this story. Their spirits and ghostly appearances seem to play with the filmmaker, to ambush him. They pursue him on his path, to bring their voices back to their home countries.Yet the story of these ghosts escapes the control of the narrator. And the ghosts do not disperse."When a person dies, he constantly roams about and becomes a ghost.It is the soul that roames about.The roaming soul is like air.So a ghost is like air.It can go everywhere."(Bhawan Singh, Wünsdorf 1917 / 2007)