Films by Timo Selengia

Germany 2024, 111 min
by Katharina Pethke

The ensemble of buildings that makes up the maternity clinic and art school in Hamburg where the director taught is the starting point for this sober interrogation of how motherhood and career can be combined based on three generations of German women.How much does a place reveal about its history? How much can forbears and their descendants know about one another? And how much continuity is contained within progress? When Katharina Pethke became a professor at Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts, it set in motion a process of reflection and research. Before, she had studied there, and so too had her mother and grandmother. Each of the women believed they were breaking new ground and yet, consciously or unconsciously, through stance or in protest, continued to carry on a legacy. This essay film examines the three generations caught between social determination and artistic ambition, self-will and motherhood, production and reproduction. The university building and its sole sculpture by a woman artist purchased by urban planner Fritz Schumacher, “Frauenschicksal” (Women’s Fate), become a mirror as well as showcase for enduring ambivalences. A virtuosic and astute work from an established filmmaker, Reproduktion explores questions of feminine and artistic identity through the lens of Pethke’s personal experience, interweaving her family biography with the architectural history of the art and media campus. [74 BERLINALE – Forum]

Germany 2020, 104 min
by Jana Matthes, Andrea Schramm

Yaar is a young Jewish Berliner who dreams of being a game designer someday. He associates nothing with Judaism but lambs being led to the slaughter house. He accuses his father of suffering from the Holocaust despite never even having experienced it firsthand. Yaar rebels by developing a computer game: "Shoah. When God was asleep". He creates a virtual Germany of the 1940s where Jews can defend themselves and Nazis don't necessarily have to be bad guys. Then, his own family's history turns his plans upside down.TACHELES - The Heart of the Matter - shows how the traumas of the survivors can even make their ways into the third generation's lives. The film asks the burning question from the perspective of a 21-old: What does Holocaust have to do with me today?

Germany 2019, 30 min
by Katharina Pethke

Elsa is 20 and graduated from high school last summer. She spends her days sleeping. Reading. Thinking. Everyone else has made up their minds: Voluntary social year, world trip, studies. Elsa simply can't do it.Anything but being confronted with thefact that the future is a wide field - undescribed and directionless. Between "luxury" and a real problem, her attitude to her own situation changes. Completely free and unbound, easy and carefree and infinitely burdened by the serious decision: Who do I want to be? Who will I be? A film about this moment of not-yet-being and the pressure to make a decision.

Germany 2013, 96 min
by Michael Obert

As a young man, American Louis Sarno heard a song on the radio that gripped his imagination. He followed the mysterious sounds all the way to the Central African rainforest and found their source with the Bayaka Pygmies, a tribe of hunters and gatherers. He never left. Today, twenty-five years later, Louis Sarno has recorded over 1,000 hours of unique Bayaka music. He is a fully accepted member of the Bayaka society and has a 13 year old son, Samedi. Now the time has come to fulfill an old promise, and Louis takes Samedi from the African rainforest to another jungle, one of concrete, glass, and asphalt: New York City. Carried by the contrasts between rainforest and urban America, with a fascinating soundtrack and peaceful, loving imagery, their stories are interwoven to form a touching portrait of an extraordinary man, and his son.

Germany 2012, 89 min
by Peter Heller (c/o filmkraft)

500 billion US dollars in a half-century - and no end to the aid is in sight. Prominent "do-gooders" of the entertainment industry such as Bono, Bob Geldorf, Angelina Jolie and Madonna, pressure the politicians to pump more development aid into Africa. An ever-increasing number of African economic experts and sociologists have begun to criticise this flood of aid. Our documentary film project follows the voices of protest that are being raised in Africa. Working in cooperation with scholars and journalists from West and East Africa, we will attempt to present the problems of development aid from an "African" perspective.