Films by Tom Schön

Germany 2019, 84 min
by Kate Tessa Lee, Tom Schön

Marie Louise Édouard lives on the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean. She’s stopped diving for octopus, which used to be her livelihood. Ecological influences and changing markets, rules introduced by politicians defining time frames and access. The film focusses on the woman and her everyday life – in concrete absence and yet tangible presence of what used to be at the centre of her life. Other jobs are needed, improvisation is called for. Around her, in her peripheral vision, on the horizon of the peaceful, unhurried pictures of a landscape bathed in light, always in motion, the gap is always perceptible. The global, climate change, the economy, the demise of a tradition are also considered in the film, but are in its form reflected in a concrete experience of time and space, from landscape and everyday life: the film describes above all a being-in-the-world that cannot catch up, a stasis, from which beauty emanates that makes us forget its curse. (17. dokumentarfilmwoche hamburg)

Germany 2018, 17 min
by Alex Gerbaulet

Two newspaper articles, ten years apart, two different women, the same wording. In 2001 the “Göttinger Zeitung” wrote that Margit (69) had lived a secluded life as an inconspicuous woman. In 2011 the “Hamburger Abendblatt” stated that Irina (65) had lived in seclusion, a non-descript woman. Up to the moment of their appearance in these newspaper lines, both women were invisible, forcefully concealed by their roles as wives and homemakers. Only for a brief moment did they claim visibility. Through acts of violence.The short film The Sleeper reconstructs and imagines the stories of these two women who were extrinsically determined throughout their lives, struggling to express themselves in vain until the only way for them to end the spiral of every-day violence was to resort to violence themselves. The cinematic narrative, too, oscillates between documentation and fiction. Everyday scenes, translated into animated still lives in the film, suggest that something is about to happen or just took place. The character of the homemaker seems omnipresent though she never appears on the scene, just as the actual protagonists Margit and Irina remain invisible.