Theme of the festival is LAYERS OF HISTORY | SCHICHTEN VON GESCHICHTE
History that inscribes itself - in biographies, landscapes, urban topographies. The open wounds leave behind or the present covers up like snow. Numerous films in the programme pursue an archaeological agenda. They open the surface and remove layer after layer in order to come to a beginning. To reconstruct one's own family history, as Thomas Heise does in his new film, which tells the lives of his relatives along the lines of historical upheavals. Or Andreas Goldstein, who digs for his father, also to better understand himself. It's about identity and regaining the power of interpretation over one's own history. Sometimes the sovereignty of interpretation also becomes a new story - as in the Macedonian capital Skopje, where an ancient centre without any historical reference is created. History as the present. Without layers.

 

Opening film is FREIER FALL: JOHANNA K. by Klaus Wildenhahn, in honour of the documentary filmmaker who sadly died last year and who accompanied the festival for many years. The documentary FREIER FALL: JOHANNA K. from 1992 is a formally courageous portrait that has lost none of its intensity and vitality to this day.

 

RETROSPECTIVE

  • Dokumentarfilm-Kombattanten: HEYNOWSKI & SCHEUMANN 
    Under the label 'Studio H&S' Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann made over 70 films between the mid-1960s and the end of the 1980s. Filming under privileged financial, political and technical circumstances, their films were successful both nationally and internationally, and became the flagship of a documentary productions of the GDR. Whether H&S's works were documentary or propaganda films, films serving a political idea or independent works of art has always been questioned. The retrospective is intended to continue the discussion.
  • and JONAS MEKAS FILMDIARIES a lecture by Eva Kuhn.

 

LineUp of german productions and co-productions:

 

 

The program as PDF - German only.