Films by Christian Obermaier

2022, 80 min
by Heinz Emigholz

The quasi-fascist architecture of Francisco Salamone's slaughterhouses in the Argentine pampas, the utopian buildings by Freddy Mamani Sylvestre in El Alto, Bolivia, and the restorative "City Palace" in Berlin are the cornerstones of an analytical documentary film that explores the dual character of architectural modernism in the field of tension between avant-garde and political propaganda.The actor Stefan Kolosko acts as a diver in the sunken city of Epecuén, where he paraphrases a text by Jorge Luis Borges, and as a curator in Berlin's "Humboldt Forum", where he enumerates the crimes of Wilhelm II. The architect Arno Brandlhuber comments on the reconstruction of the "Berlin City Palace".The film was shot in Berlin, Bolivia and Argentina in 2021.

Germany 2022, 95 min
by Heinz Emigholz

The Neo-Andean architecture of Freddy Mamani Sylvestre, influenced by indigenous culture, adorns the Bolivian city of El Alto. A psychoactive inspection at 4,000 metres above sea level.As a pioneer of Neo-Andean architecture, Freddy Mamani Silvestre attracts attention far beyond the borders of Bolivia. His non-conformist designs are influenced by the culture of the Aymara, the biggest ethnical group in the country, echoing their myths and patterns. Buildings constructed between 2008 and 2021 are circled, inspected and captured, in part 35 of the ongoing series “Photography and beyond”.Like giant jewels, the Cholets rise into the sky above the Bolivian city of El Alto, at 4,000 metres above sea level. Cholets, a neologism created from chalet and Cholo, the local term for indigenous people, are the creations of architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre, born in 1971. Several dozen buildings designed by him adorn the otherwise fairly unglamorous city otherwise mainly dominated by raw red brick. Mamani’s built fantasies, on the other hand, are striking, arrogant and bold. Snakes seem to be slithering up their facades, scattered diamonds cling to the glazing and occasionally the whole thing is crowned by a stand-alone residential building. But the Cholets are mainly used for festivities, because they house the so-called “salones de eventos”. Emigholz unlocks psychoactive places that evoke the interior of pinball machines and, in their confident splendour, triumph over the richer neighbouring city of La Paz. [65 DOK Leipzig, Carolin Weidner]

Germany 2021, 88 min
by Christian Bäucker

In his film HEIMATKUNDE, the director returns to the school building of his childhood in East Germany. For almost 25 years it lay empty, seemingly waiting to be revived. The remains of socialist education are pasted over, hidden, forgotten.In tentative interviews with contemporary witnesses we are gradually coming nearer to the systematic manipulation of the child’s mind. In this way, it becomes understandable how the dictatorship functioned and turned into the commonplace “that’s just the way it is”, which still exists today and thwarts any criticism of and debate about history.However, overcoming the German “duality” remains impossible without looking back and reappraising this form of education that generated the authoritarian mind.

Germany 2020, 68 min
by Ekaterina Reinbold

The movie где остался домовой / STANDING IN FRONT OF MANY HOUSES has two titles. The literal translation from Russian is .Where did the Domovoi go?. and refers to an old Slavic popular belief. Hence the house spirit, the Domovoi, ensures the protection and peace of a place. The English title plays with the impossibility of a direct translation of this figure and describes through the vivid STANDING IN FRONT OF MANY HOUSES the feeling of being lost in a diasporic experience. где остался домовой / STANDING IN FRONT OF MANY HOUSES plays at the intersection between fiction and documentary film and shows the return of the young woman Natasha to a former home at the coast of Lake Baikal in southwestern Siberia. Her friend Katya accompanies Natasha on her journey with a handheld camera that captures the events.After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Natasha immigrates as a child with her family to Germany. The film begins today, twenty years later, when Natasha returns for the first time to her unknown home. Natasha's time in Baikal Port is mainly structured through her everyday encounters with the people who live there. In different situations, she meets them and gets into conversations about employment and living conditions that are still marked by the effects of the Perestroika. While Natasha gains these intimate insights into different ways of living, she reflects on her own position and tries to make a connection with this place, which is a part of her identity. The cinematic drawing of intimate portraits of people living in Baikal Port as well as Natasha’s play- acting as a returning, identity-seeking figure is accompanied by an ever-present recording camera. It shakes, zooms and focuses, it behaves like an autonomous body. This always raises the question of who is the actual experiencing body of this journey – the person behind or in front of the camera?.

Germany, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina 2020, 70 min
by Clarissa Thieme

„Was bleibt I Šta ostaje I What remains / Re-visited" is a re-encounter with the places and landscapes that already played the leading role in Thieme's „Was bleibt I Šta ostaje I What remains" (Berlinale 2010): Sites of War Crimes in the 1990s in Bosnia Herzegovina. Ten years later, Thieme returns to them – with those past recordings in tow. „Was bleibt I Šta ostaje I What remains / Re-visited" is an experimental filmic setup that invites interactions from locals without forcing them. The result is a careful approach to the places as well as the people, permeated by the questions of what was, what is, and how one can speak about it.

2020, 76 min
by Anja Dornieden, Juan David González Monroy

Aurochs is the name given to the wild ancestor of modern cattle. The aurochs has the distinction of being the first documented case of extinction. The last known wild aurochs died in the Jaktorów [Jaktoro,w] Forest in Poland in 1627. Both, hunting and the introduction of domesticated cattle led to its decline and disappearance. Its value, however, derived not just from being a source of sustenance. Traits that were attributed to the animal, such as speed, strength and courage, imbued it with great symbolic power.  Some of its body parts were ascribed with supernatural powers. The skin of the forehead and a cross-shaped bone inside the heart were prized for their magical properties. Those who carried them became possessors of the animal's traits.In the 20th century, efforts to bring back the aurochs from extinction began to materialize.

2018, 36 min
by Heinz Emigholz

A confrontation and comparison of two church buildings, which could hardly be more different, but also a dialogue between various concepts of church and community: the Protestant Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen and the Catholic Cathedral in Orvieto. The cathedral in the central square in the middle of the city of Orvieto, with its visual histories in the interior and on the façade, and the imposing brick building of the church on the edges of Copenhagen, which forms the center of a housing complex of like-minded persons. Both radiate into their surroundings, the cathedral from great heights into the mountains around, the church itself like a rock in the flat land. The cathedral as a community achievement of great craftsmanship and the church like a strictly constructed dogma. Horizontal meets vertical, north meets south, mysticism meets joie de vivre, Protestantism meets Catholicism, clarity meets complexity, however they are distributed when it is a matter of the ideology of holy sites and the reflection and contemplation made possible inside them: the beauty of craftsmanship and political intentions.