Portrait

“Please Stop Breaking the Windows. Still Occupied,” a text panel that casually appears in Marian Mayland’s first single-channel video work, already pointing in the direction of her later films. Read More

Birgit Hein was among the most important figures of avant-garde film culture in Germany and Europe. Along with her ex-husband and collaborator Wilhelm Hein, she led film into radical and uncharted territories, concerning herself unreservedly with the development, criticism and dissemination of avant-garde film.
She passed away in February 2023 at the age of 80, leaving behind a trail of pioneering accomplishments, singular in their scope and significance. Read More

An image that fits to a T – what is that exactly? And what precedes it – perhaps another image, one before the inner eye, or merely just a vague thematic hunch? These are questions that arise quickly when you explore and engage yourself with Volker Schlecht, who pivots back and forth between the moving and the non-moving image. Read More

Ojoboca (Anja Dornieden und Juan David González Monroy) machen zugleich mehr und weniger als „Kurzfilme“. Mehr, weil sie neben Filmen auch Performances und Installationen entwickeln, derzeit an ihrem zweiter Langfilm arbeiten und Texte von einer eigenwilligen Literarizität fast alle ihre Bewegtbildarbeiten begleiten. Read More

“Are you afraid you’re not actually here,” asks a resounding voice in Gudrun Krebitz’s latest work “Echodrome” as the water ripples and splashes. There it is again – the ‘you’. A hallmark of Krebitz, a word that is at times a dialogic reassurance of the self, often addressing some metaphorical counterpart, or mostly directed at the potential audience. Read More

Little effort is required when gleaning facts from the available databases. We soon discover here that the non-profit Chemnitz Filmworkshop is a media-education institute that “promotes young filmic talent”. Its headquarters and official address is the Clubkino Siegmar cinema, which was entrusted to the association in 1996. But what exactly lies behind these sobering facts and figures, behind these ideas, which is far greater than them and has already been lived out for decades by the out-and-out filmmakers from Chemnitz? Read More

Sophie Linnenbaum, who was born in Nuremberg in 1986, is an observer of small everyday moments and human encounters. Yet her films are not intended to be understood as pure entertainment. Nor do they let themselves be casually consumed and then founder in our memories overflowing with moving images. Read More

Whenever Alex Gerbaulet says the word »I« in her works, she is also always saying »history« and vice versa. Read More

“Everyone can see that your body is high-class. You have to make something out of it. Why are you so sad? You haven’t been sitting in front of the TV of life, you have been active. What a guy!” – an off-screen male voice accompanies Max the model as he rambles around looking for a hotel in a city where a male-model killer is up to mischief. The video piece “pretty boyz don’t die” (2016) forms the beginning to the “pretty pretty mad sad” (2016-18) four-part short film series and is the first filmic work by the writer and filmmaker Jovana Reisinger. Read More

Fragmentary memories act like a common thread, taking us through the works of Sylvia Schedelbauer as they oscillate between experimental and essay-film genres, and which could also be called “filmic… Read More

Nicolaas Schmidt used to be a musician, he founded a virtual support group on sunsets, and has held exhibitions of colours, objects and photos. He usually works alone, having started with photography and filmmaking at almost the same time, before soon moving on to installative pieces in real and virtual spaces. In his work, people are confronted by spaces, objects and non-human animals that are almost their equals, for Schmidt is an explorer of balance. Schmidt’s films intervene in an “ordered” – i.e. hierarchical – perception of reality, and it is only the isolation of the cinema auditorium that lets us succumb to their open, flowing and circulating structures. Read More

Spengemann, Eichberg, Goldkamp, Hans – four names arranged in a circle appear at the end of the credits of several short films that were made in the context of the HFBK Hamburg (University of Fine Arts Hamburg) since 2014. The four filmmakers flippantly describe the logo, composed of their surnames, as a “sticker”: a sticker can be attached to a film, but should not infringe upon it in any way. Read More

“I’d like to create images that fuel the illusions of memory,” says the artist Robert Seidel (1), who positions his work between film and projection art. This conflicting field of… Read More

“I’m a fan of fast movies,” says Brenda Lien. She values aesthetic compositions that get to the point. Beauty videos and make-up tutorials, cat films and digital meditation sessions: Over… Read More

Since the beginning of the 2000s, Stefan Panhans has made a name for himself with works that refuse to be clearly assigned to an artistic genre or field of practice and entwine still and moving, as well as found and newly created images and spaces within constantly changing constellations. Doing so, he works with photography in which filmic plots are intimated, video installations that merge elements of theatre and computer games, texts that evolve like fictions you can enter, and performances that become films. He produces images of a present that is defined by the rhythms of goods and media consumption, that prefabricates their promises of salvation in the form of advertising, therapies and lifestyles and, doing so, fans the desires for the authentic and the immediate at the same time, and lets them ossify in their own clichés. Read More

Just the first few seconds of this film are enough to create an all-pervading sense of oppression that predominates for the next 15 minutes. “Berlin Metanoia” is a dark, almost (hellishly) dreamlike trip into the innermost realms of a city that loves to market itself as young and cool, but which has lost its soul somewhere between hipsterism, tourist onslaughts and hype. In his latest short fiction film, which celebrated its premiere at the 2016 Berlinale, Erik Schmitt approaches the latent psychotic Berliner identity with an intensity that continues to reverberate for a long time afterwards. Read More

Lukas Marxt wasn’t particularly surprised when Adam Hyman of the LA Film Forum told the audience at the Goethe Institute Los Angeles they need not worry about the narrative of… Read More

The films by Kyne Uhlig and Nikolaus Hillebrand are full of things that you would usually find in the kitchen or a closet. Gherkins march in step, spoons develop a dubious life of their own and lonely socks desperately search for their better halves. The filmmakers, who live and work together in Cologne and go by the name of “niky-Bilder”, prefer to use everyday as well as lost-and-found objects and breathe new life into them for their animated films – and that’s especially practical considering that they live right next door to their studio, making it easier to, whenever the need arises, place the contents of their domestic cupboards in the spotlight. Read More