Films by Jochen Jezussek

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.

Germany 2019, 119 min
by Ute Adamczewski

STATUS AND TERRAIN tells the story of an escalation. Its point of departure are the so-called early concentration camps. Set up immediately after the National Socialist seizure of power they aimed at the elimination of political opponents. Today these camps are largely forgotten. STATUS AND TERRAIN is about the way time has overwritten these sites, and about how different political cultures of remembrance have become inscribed in them. The Film entangles three periods of German History. They form a loose narrative in which violence as a means of imposing power plays a pivotal role.

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.