Maike Höhne

In the film Night and Fog, Alain Resnais uses various documentary techniques to make the incomprehensible nature of the Holocaust tangible and thus link the present with what happened in the past. The film, which was shown in schools in Germany from the 1960s onwards, unfortunately often in black and white, made the extent of the guilt clear. No excuses for anyone. The Nacht und Nebel decree was a decree issued by Adolf Hitler; its purpose was to make people disappear without a trace.

The best friend commits suicide. The other wants to follow, but is aware of his responsibility: he searches for a chosen family for his brother. There is no one outside their own age group—the world is one they create themselves. The cinematic means are extremely precise: music, framing, acting—plus the narrative of longing, violence, and powerful love. A love film that transcends time. For Poggi/Vinel, cinema is a way of conveying experiences sensually—far beyond the narrative, it is about everything: about life itself!

The structure of the film reveals more and more about the couple's personal and professional lives at every moment. They sell dog meat. Dog meat is a delicacy in South Vietnam. It is raw, physical work, done in the streets. The film alternates between shots of the work and the couple explaining what they do and how it works. They are bound together by a strong love. But they do this work despite all—it is a way to earn money. And they make a good living from it, because people like to eat dogs. They don't admit it openly, but they actively do so. In this business, we cannot print business cards.’ And thus reveals the crux of the problem: it is a business because there is demand. If there were no demand, there would be no business. The grey area of duality is represented by the couple's small gestures when they address the camera and the artist himself. Better than Friends combines and reflects in its simplicity the complexity of life.

“A targeted television announcement for all girls aged 18 to 25 from the middle class [...] an attempt to highlight the problems faced by girls from their social class in terms of emancipation and make them relevant to other girls.” — Hamburger Filmschau, 1970

With Programmhinweise, Christiane Gehner naturally combines performative practice with film. The artistic intervention is formulated from the heart—the longing to simply be and what it really takes to achieve this. Programmhinweise is a feminist pamphlet from the independent film scene in Hamburg in the late 1960s. The film was long lost but was screened again in a major retrospective at the Berlinale Shorts 2018. Programmhinweise is contemporary, even more than 50 years later.

In letter to a friend, artist Emily Jacir writes a letter to her friend, Eyal, after a military situation on her street leaves it strewn with empty canisters of the Triple Chaser, a particularly destructive type of teargas. Her letter is an intimate and intricate recounting of her street, its history and her family’s past. Interlacing images, textures, and sounds from over a century, Jacir unravels layers of this ancient city, and the constant threat it lives under.

To critically reflect on our social, political, and cultural present, we need artistic practices and attitudes that examine the foundation upon which we stand and produce work that is truthful, touching, and free. This also requires a certain speed and independence. Ideally, a method that can achieve great things with a small budget. The question negotiated in letter to a friend, is much bigger than the artistic self, than the privacy of the author. This film rebalances the scales between art and activism. This film explores time in illuminating dark fields of time in the present, casting shadows into the future, all based on insights from history.

Sometimes it just happens—Chris Marker was in love with this city, with cinema, with the moment. He takes photographs, surrenders himself, and later in the editing room, it becomes a film about exactly that—the past, what surrounds us, haunts us, drives us, drives us away. Fiction and reality merge—the future is yesterday and the template for the cinematic possibilities of storytelling, including the reduction of movement to the bare essentials. La Jetée is tenderness in all its dystopia.

"In the spring of 1975, around two hundred prostituted women occupied the Saint-Nizier church in Lyon. Laughing or fearful in front of Carole Roussopoulos’s camera, or awkwardly concealed, they testify as women and mothers to demand that the police, fiscal, and social harassment of which they are victims cease. Outside the church, video monitors broadcast the proceedings to passers-by, mostly men." Without Les prostitués de Lyon parlent, Jeanne Dielman would never have appeared, as Delphine Seyrig had worked and continued working with Carole on many films. Les prostitués de Lyon parlent stands out as one of the many videoworks that allowed communities to speak out and to be heard and seen.

In the Romani language, Roma means “people.” This film lends a voice to these people, who tell of how they were arrested and locked up in camps and prisons, and how 90 percent of their families never returned from the death camps. Att Vara Zigenare. It's the first film to bear witness to the persecution of Sinti and Roma in Germany and Austria. Peter Nestler made most of his films together with his wife Zsóka Nestler. Together, they listened empathetically. That should never stop.

“This four-minute film explores our response to stereotypes—aural, visual, and ideological.  Smith signals these stereotypes to the viewer through a chiefly associational system, which deftly manipulates the path of our expectations. The structure is stunningly simple and deceptively subtle.  We are taken on a journey from one concrete stereotype to its diametric opposite, as images transform and juxtapose to, ultimately, invert our interpretation of what we see and hear.” — Gary Davis. I can only add: simple and moving, widening the visual dramatic gap ever further, only to let it snap shut. We: captivated.

Memory as a form of resistance, of not forgetting, of not letting go of a culture that is so rich, and at the same time Kwaku Ananse tells us about something greater than ourselves—understanding. Semi-autobiographical, linked to ancient mythology, the story of Kwaku Ananse, a trickster in West African stories who appears as both spider and man. Ananse teaches us that there are two sides to everything and everyone.