Films by Rainer Gerlach

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 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 2014, 40 min
by Georg Nonnenmacher

Hand-luggage is packed in a cloth shopping bag, one last cigarette before there is a knock at the door – inmate Rene is being transported. For a court hearing, he is traveling in a prison bus to another institution in another city. SPACEMEN accompanies him and shows the tedious procedure of the transport from his point of view – an exhausting route full of controls, constant stop-and-go at locked doors and gates, and endless waiting. When the bus is en route, the world passes by through the window in cinemascope format. The view of vastness, life and freedom is paraded before the prisoners’ eyes; a world in which they do not belong. With each stop, each station and each detention center the bus approaches, each change between prison and outside world, it becomes ever more perceptible that the revocation of freedom is simultaneously also the revocation of all means of autonomous action. With insight into their emotions and thoughts, Rene and four other inmates illustrate how the procedure of this 'trip' penetrates their everyday prison routine and at the same time pushes that which has long been suppressed back into their consciousness: desires, emotions, and time.