Borjana Gaković

Intimate insights are granted here - not because we are allowed to watch the face of the protagonist, who is also the director, in close-ups as she lies down to sleep, but because this film, with all its components - shaky, close-up images, the mantra-like, repetitive soundtrack that settles into the ear, the fluid montage - can rather subtly convey what the uncertainties mean when one suddenly finds oneself in a new environment. On the subway ride from Blackheath to Charing Cross, an image appears daily, observable from the window of the passing train: Take Courage is written on a building wall in large letters. The advertising slogan becomes a metaphor, an encouragement, an anchor. If the camera means support and gives Maija-Lene Rettig comfort as if it was a diary or a best friend, one could say that for the audience that same function has this sensitively composed film. (Borjana Gaković, 2022)

Pleasurably, daydreams in the form of aestheticized black-and-white images of fragmented bodies, which stand above any form of gender attribution, mix in a flawless, organic, flowing montage with the color images that show a woman entirely focused on herself and her own desire – on a meadow and in a public toilet. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, Claudia Schillinger created a queer cinema avant la lettre. In the announcement of her short film BETWEEN in the catalog of the women’s film festival Feminale from Cologne (founded in 1984 as the first of its kind in the FRG), even in 1990 the right words were still being sought to describe this cinematic phenomenon for which there still seems to be no vocabulary. And yet it is aptly stated there: “Vagabond body parts, detached from their affiliation to responsible bodies/ heads/ persons.” (Borjana Gaković, 2022)
 

An autobiographical animated documentary by Betina Kuntzsch about her mother, a passionate Chinese Checkers player—with the unique voice of its author narrating from off-screen. "The film uses animated found objects from the family storage to recount the life of my mother. It is a 20th century biography: Growing up in the Nazi era, teenage years in post-war Germany, the building of the Wall, and life in the GDR as well as in a re-united Germany. It is a story of escape and conformism." (Betina Kuntzsch)

Originally conceived as a video installation for a gallery space, this powerful work from Adela Jušić unleashes its full artistic potential in the darkness of the cinema on the big screen: a full frontal view of the wrinkled, pained face of her grandmother as the artist colors her hair. The soundtrack features Jušić whispering the memories of her now deceased grandmother in an unbroken stream; a woman who, at the end of her life, appeared to draw a kind of conclusion through a comparison of the two wars she survived. (Borjana Gaković, 2022)

Humorous depiction of pedagogical ‘sex education measures’ in biology lessons – including practical exercises that a girl carries out under the watchful eye of her little brother. Géza Böszörményi’s coming-of-age short film was made in the film class of János Herskó and Illés György, in collaboration with his fellow students Tibor Dimény, Gyula Bognár, János Czipauer, and Mihály Ráday – but also two female fellows: Alongside Judit Ember, who later gained a reputation for having made the most banned films in socialist Hungary, the film’s credits also mention Lívia Gyarmathy, who was one of the most important Hungarian female feature film directors of the 1960s, along with Márta Mészáros and Judit Elek. Lívia Gyarmathy and Géza Böszörményi were married to each other and each helped with the other’s films. The sometimes grotesque humour of Böszörményi’s BIOLOGY LESSONS gave a foretaste of Gyarmathy’s first long feature film, DO YOU KNOW MONDAY SUNDAY?, made two years later. (Borjana Gaković, 2024) (This text is an edited excerpt from the longer text from the catalogue of 70. International Short Film Festival Oberhausen on the occasion of the hommage dedicated to János Herskó, curated by Borjana Gaković.)

Mara Mattuschka, born and raised in Sofia, moved to Vienna in 1976. From 1983 she studied animation film in Maria Lassnig’s class at the University of Applied Arts. The versatile artist, performer, director has had a significant impact on the feminist experimental film scene since the mid-1980s and has been a regular presence at film festivals throughout Europe. Mimi Minus, an art figure invented by her and recurring in her films as a protagonist (Mara Mattuschka herself), is featured in S.O.S. Extraterrestria as an alien giantess, sometimes reminiscent of King Kong, sometimes of Godzilla. After making herself chic according to her own ideas of beauty, she goes on an exploratory tour of the city. In words of Stefan Grissemann: “A Godzilla imitator on her way to herself: [...] making nonsense, producing destruction, copulating with the Eiffel Tower. [...] E.T. staggers through the night & the City, looking like Mimi Minus and catching little projected people in her hand, kind of like the big amorous monkey of the horror movie. And the war & disaster cinema watches, open-mouthed, until at the end a toy city that would like to be a real one, laconically
collapses.” (Borjana Gaković, 2022)

In this documentary essay, Congolese artist David Shongo addresses the problems of knowledge production and asks the important question of how it was influenced permanently and systematically by colonialist power. Analysing historical photographs, he exposes the perfidious mechanisms of colonial historiography and contrasts them with conversations with traditional scholars. They represent an exploited culture confronted not only with the theft of economic goods. It was also robbed – in a historical dimension, too – of self-perception and self-determination. The starting point of his analysis is the examination of the photo archive of the German ethnographer and anthropologist Hans Himmelheber at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich. But Shongo’s critique of colonial historical fictions – poetic and meticulously precise at the same time – goes far beyond this. Combining specially produced and expressive images of present-day Congo with staged scenes, an offscreen commentary and documentary recordings, he manages to penetrate extremely complex contexts. A film essay that denounces the “privatisation of memory” – and contributes a long overdue, extremely important political and aesthetic position to the virulent restitution debate. (Borjana Gaković, DOK Leipzig 2023)

Irena Vrkljan explores the urban landscape at the Goslarer Ufer in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district. Gasometers, firewalls, a sluice, the depots of the city cleaning service and a colony of leaves by the river. A text by the writer Benno Meyer-Wehlack (1928-2014), with whom Irena Vrkljan had lived for almost 50 years, underscores the images. (Tobias Hering)

Angelika Levi has been making films since the early 1980s. They are just as different as the different life conditions, political situation or subject matter requires. And all her films have something in common – Levi’s cheerful, ironic, differentiated, very precise gaze, and her unwavering will for freedom. She is constantly searching for this, and she finds it – everywhere, even when she looks into the abysses of human history. Because there is always a way to emancipatory response. In this specimen from the mid-1990s - Freunde (Friends) - marmalade is wonderfully playfully eaten and mixed with “Russian bread” (Patience) – the alphabet cookies gain on their cinematic expressiveness. On the rooftops of Berlin, the true refuge of those years, letters become meaningful (moving) images. The film, meanwhile, is a cinematic celebration of life, friendship, bodies and freedom, and at the same time a tongue-in-cheek roller coaster
through film genres – from splatter to coming of age (and gender) to the summer fairy tale. At the time, the silent 8mm film was publicly screened at parties and events as a kind of music video – with synchronized electronic music by Josje Pater and Angelika Levi themselves, played with Atari computer. In the newer digital age, the prolific director – now a professor of film and video at the renowned School of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung) in Offenbach am Main – merged the sound and image layers, added subtitles. (Borjana Gaković, 2022)
 

"International audiences might be aware of this exceptional director from Bosnia and Herzegovina as early as the year 2000, when she presented her documentary film RED RUBBER BOOTS / CRVENE GUMENE ČIZME (2000) at roughly 20 film festivals around the world. Though captured on 35mm film for a mere 18 minutes, one can already sense the devastating extent of the genocidal war crimes perpetrated in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Jasmila Žbanić accompanies Jasna, the film's protagonist, in her tireless search for the mortal remains of her two children – kidnapped by Serbian soldiers during the Bosnian War when they were only nine months and four years old, and presumably buried in a mass grave. Unsparingly, Žbanić shows the trauma of Bosnian-Herzegovinian post-war society in the form of the countless mass graves opened after the war, whose contents must literally be brought to the surface again. Equally appalling is the hopelessness that accompanies this state of affairs – for Jasna, and for Jasmila Žbanić's film as well, there can be no happy ending – to paraphrase renowned film scholar Pavle Levi's summation of the dilemma in his 2018 book "Jolted Images (Unbound Analytic)": For what can one even wish for Jasna as a viewer? That she finds her children? That would mean unbearable certainty. Or that she doesn't find them, thus retaining at least a tiny glimmer of hope that they may indeed be alive somewhere, miraculously, against overwhelming odds? For Jasna, this would mean many further years of searching, from one exhumation to the next, living in uncertainty and constant fear, surrounded by unimaginable, inhuman, definitive violence." (Borjana Gaković) (The text is an excerpt from a longer text on Jasmila Žbanićs work, on the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to her by the goEast Film Festival in Wiesbaden, printed in the festival catalogue 2023).