Moving through architectures of memory, power and desire, the films within the program trace how cities are imagined, constructed and demolished. Concrete appears not only as material but as ideology: as site of both collective and individual aspirations. From the socialist utopias of Tirana to the ghostly infrastructures of Munich, from the erasures of Palestinian homes to the lost neighborhoods of China, intimate gestures are set against the vastness of political regimes. What emerges is a dialog between the dream of a city and the weight of its foundations. (Boris Hadžija, Linn Löffler)
The starting point is an excerpt from the Albanian feature film “Qyteti me i ri ne bote” (Xhanfise Keko 1974, “The Youngest City in the World”), in which a boy dreams of a modern city where progress and change are represented by construction and sealing. The film revolves around the historical and current processes of transformation in urban space and reflects on the power of images, historical and contemporary utopias, and their interplay with architecture. An essay on new and old regimes, power, propaganda, and the accessibility of public space.
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- Director: Johannes Gierlinger
We enter a space between the vast and the intimate – where drops become celestial bodies and fractures in film emit light like distant stars. Without mediation of a camera, the film collapses distance between observer and observed, macro and micro. Unreal places are constructed at random, places that could not exist otherwise. Let yourself fall and dream is the key!
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Premiere:
German Premiere
In Munich, the Olympic shopping centre is being built for the 1972 Summer Olympics. Many so-called guest workers were employed on the construction site. In 2016, nine people were murdered in a right-wing terrorist attack at this shopping mall. In 1982, Sohrab Shahid Saless made the film “Addressee Unknown“ in response to the rapid rise of racism in the Federal Republic of Germany. In this film, people repeatedly walk past walls and facades that are smeared with right-wing extremist slogans. By interweaving three historical eras, IN RETROSPECT impressively reveals the forces of hatred that also manifest themselves in architecture.
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Nominated:
Goldener Key
- Director: Mila Zhluktenko, Daniel Asadi Faezi
Brothers Ziad and Moody spend their last moments in the family home they’re forced to leave due to a scheduled demolition as part of the city’s development plans. To pass the time while they move the furniture outside, Moody turns on the TV, which soon blares news of Palestinian home demolitions in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, casting a somber shadow over their already melancholic last day in their disappearing home.
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- Director: Mahmoud Ibrahim
The filmmaker accompanies her father, an artist, on a search for his childhood home in southwestern China. He wants to fulfill his ageing mother’s wish to see the streets and people of her hometown again through him. But changed by the tides of history, the streets are barely recognizable and continue to change. Father and daughter wander through the city and reflect on what it means to see and create images. Which (hi)stories are preserved in the rapidly changing cityscape, and which are erased?
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Nominated:
Goldener Key
