Films by Dörte Völz-Mammarella

2015, 79 min
by Eva C. Heldmann

The film interviews five people who cannot pay their electricity bills. They live below the poverty line without light and heat, in or near large cities. Berlin based artist Laurence Grave acts a composite rôle, representing aspects of the other people. She sees, hears and touches in her forsaken apartment, and feels limited and excluded. At the same time she is extra-sensitive to the passage of light, day and night, through her windows. A long indoor twilight persists between the bright sunlight and the night car lights that both shine onto her walls making 'cinema'. The sounds that creep into the apartment are just alien to her. The interviewed people read their responses for the camera. (This technique relaxes the original interview and also gives the people some interpretative distance from themselves.) They speak of how they lost work, then electricity, then hope, and finally found clever solutions to their precarious situations.In the end the actress rises from her dark world to dizzy heights, flashing with her own electricity, remaking the rules of the game. "Elektra" triumphs! A film about light and darkness, noise and silence, belonging and being excluded, reality and show/chaos.

Germany 2008
by Andrea Lammers

The sun rises fast here in Guatemala as the folks of "La Aurora - the Dawn of hope" prepare the first year anniversary of their community. Heavily armed soldiers enter the village, children come running. There had never seen such men in the refugee camps, where they grew up. Villagers gather, accuse the patrol of what the army did to their families a dozen of years before. And soon one of more than 600 massacres counted in this small country will take place, but also the beginning of something very new: The very first time survivors go to court, filing charges for "state crime". What they intend now are small steps on halfway to heaven.