Recommended from 14 years old Essential to the fascination of documentary images is the capability attributed to them to depict and immortalize conditions and processes, to transport reality and make it accessible. The cinema illustrates the world. By doing so, it also forms itself. To illustrate something is not a passive but a creative process. The program compiles five documentary works which unveil things in wholly different ways. (Sebastian Markt)
A young filmmaker wants to make a film: a hybrid form between documentary and fiction about friends wanting to make art. The kind professor is fond of the concept and asks the protagonists for their permission. So far, so good. However, soon problems start to pile up. The camera man doubts the screenplay, which he thinks is too heavy on dialogue. One artist is too successful to spare enough time, the other feels like the concept frames her too much as the unsuccessful one. One's own desire to tell and make visible comes into conflict with the desires of others to be seen and not seen. "Why not use actors?" asks the camera man. With a lot of humor and self-irony, Kai Ro Liao tells of complex relationships of the documentary to the truth.… >>>
The view from the window falls on landscapes that become smaller and smaller, cloud covers, rising and setting suns. Images many of us will have made themselves before from the window seat of an airplane: the tourist's gaze. However, voices from the off tell of something egregious. While traveling to a festival where they show their film, the two filmmakers from the Republic of Kongo have to change over in Angola. At passport control they are accused of having counterfeit papers, they end up in a nightmarish Kafkaesque detention from which it seems almost impossible to contact the outside world. With an impossible image, the work of Collectif Faire-Part resolves the paradox of telling a documentary story about an aspect of the contemporary border regime that is stubbornly hidden from the public gaze.… >>>
"Sara misses out on making it to the finals of the state championships" would be about the full title of Silvia Poeta Paccati's documentary miniature. Simultaneously, the title is the only factual information the film provides. The image it shows to us is a single long shot. It follows, from a distance, a girl at a sporting event, showing her in a gymnastics outfit as she makes her way through the hall, where, visibly emotionally distraught, she comes to stand next to an older woman, who then speaks at length to her. What both say is inaudible, but their facial expressions and gestures are clearly visible. In this way, a drama unfolds in the minds of the viewers that shifts from the screen to the imagination.… >>>
Mirrors are abstract for her, says Kelsey, a casual object. For those who see, they are an important means to affirm them of themselves. Blind people create their image of themselves by different means, by sounds and lived experiences. The film observes young blind people as they interact with the world, in hearing and touching, reading with their fingertips, writing on the braille machine, and listens to them talk about a world without visibility. In between, he creates images that abstract from the world as sighted people experience it. Approaching the lived world of blind people by means of cinema, is an endeavor the filmmaker himself calls impossible. But in failure, too, something becomes visible.… >>>
A day by the sea, a misty view into the open, feet in the surf, groynes and seagulls, two shadowy figures in the distance. And from the off, a cheerful song sings: "i'm alone here because it's foggy and rains. But I don't give a shit, and the waves come back [...] I am a photographer, in motion and in still." Dagie Brundert has been working with Super 8 films for more than three decades, often taking the personal, the mundane, and creating a cinematic mythology all her own from it. Her latest film, developed in algae, vitamin C and washing soda, takes a look at the horizon, at the ground where one's own body meets the world. And casually asks profound questions. What do you see, when you look upon yourself?… >>>
