Putting down roots, feeling one’s roots, breaking away from them – as far as is necessary and possible. Family means comfort and origin, but also wounds and the painful confrontation with one’s own nature and heritage. This program begins with a warm ending and leads to a truthful beginning. It deals with oppression and the oppressed, as well as with identities that extend beyond their nature and work into the past. Three family portraits meet two experimental works that ask questions of reckoning, reconciliation, acceptance, and resilience. (Linn Löffler)
„Do not go gently into that good night; (…) Rage, rage against the dying of the light“ (Dylan Thomas).
Carroll B. Williams, an African American forester of Indigenous descent, looks back on a fulfilling life that he has lived with gratitude despite a discriminatory U.S. society. His activism for equality and his pioneering role as a qualified Black forester testify to his energy, courage, and openness. A sensitive portrait, shot on Super 8 in warm colours and filled with poetic, intimate conversations and memories shared between grandfather and granddaughter.
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Premiere:
German Premiere
In search of answers to his father’s silence, the director turns to private videos and photographs from his family’s past. They offer insights into behaviours and reflexes that also shape his own life. His grandfather’s unexamined Nazi past becomes the key to this silence across generations. Masterfully edited found footage meets the filmmaker’s reflections on past and future.… >>>
DREAM(MACHINE, HUMAN) is a sensorial drift through multi-layered realities. It can be interpreted as a machine trying to understand or predict human dreams; machine and human dreaming together; a human’s dream from a machine – or any other variations of the three words. The story takes place in an ambiguous time, unfolding as machine-salvaged fragments of human memories, or as a mythology of human demise and metamorphosis.… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
In a small Slovak village, traditional customs are upheld and conventional family ideals are lived out. Growing up in this environment was difficult for the queer filmmaker. For her film, she returns and goes to the place where it hurts most. She confronts her mother unflinchingly about her discriminatory views and examines the intense social pressure that especially women are subjected to. A confrontation with family and society that offers no happy ending, but fosters mutual understanding and the possibility of moving forward on one’s own path through uprooting.… >>>
- Director: Jaroslava Jelchová
