07.09. – 17.09.2023 | GEGENkino #9
Last year, our editorial ended with: saddle your bats! So we thought: more of it! That is why at GEGENkino #9, there will be talking goats (with subtitles). Theatrically dying budgies. Fishing boats as a swimming Gomorrah. Dogs. Dogs. Dogs. And the rabbit from NEKROMANTIK. The animal world in film is a world of fictions, humanization, often also of abuse. But also of speculative fiction, complicity, poetry, reflection, in short: humanly made through and through. Or maybe not? This year, we will be exploring the animal-human-relationships in a series of documentary and essayist forms: ANIMAL REALITIES. It has become quite a considerable section. Short, mid-length, feature length. Digital and analogue. Historic and contemporary. Experimental, immersive, contemplative, self-reflexive. We will carefully examine much discussed works as well as marginalised positions. Beyond this focus, we also encounter animals. During the opening night at UT Connewitz for instance, the previously mentioned goats of THE REAL LIFE AND STRANGE SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON refreshingly free ourselves from a anthroprocentric fixation without the film trying to genuinely empathize with an animal perception. Director Benjamin Deboosere will be our guest for a Q&A. In addition, the opening film will be the feature debut of the Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji to marvel at: OMEN is a colourful, unpredictable, occult bomb of a film. Definitely a banger!
As an additional venue this year, we welcome the mobile Milieu-Cinema from Vienna. A converted moving picture-truck with a 35mm projector, which will stop at Rabet, next to Kino der Jugend and at Wagenplatz Karl Helga to fire forgotten findings, fun fair films and current creepy fun at you. We are especially looking forward to our visitors from Prishtina. On two evenings, Alush Gashi and Ilir Hasanaj will present works from the Kosovan film scene and the environment of Kino ARMATA, in which they are both active.
What else? Jörg Buttgereit has written a book about role models and his film works. Along with plenty of illustrative material and a high entertainment value, he will present Nicht Jugendfrei!: Tagebuch aus West-Berlin, and afterwards we will watch his necrophiliac cult film part one. A further book presentation riddled with entertaining examples of popular culture will be brought to us by journalist Jens Balzer. In Ethics Of Appropriation, he sounds out the complex aspects of cultural appropriation and argues the case for a prolific dealing with it.
Let us continue with an “Attention!” – this year, the live scoring will be an organ concert! Silent film pianist Richard Siedhoff will add a live score to the impressionist, black and white, underground splatter film BEGOTTEN on the venerable cinema organ of Grassi Museum. Additionally, he breathes a soundtrack into SCHENEC-TADY III by Heinz Emigholz, an abstract landscape film with mathematically arranged images. We dedicate a small homage to the almost forgotten filmmaker Martin Müller and his “aimless cinema” – wonderful that he will be coming to Leipzig and accompany the selection of his works.
More in staccato because all would go beyond scope otherwise: Selma Doborac will present her challenging DE FACTO and talk with us about it. A Mafia saga from Bollywood, Filipino seven-hour-slow-cinema, preposterous mask-horror from Austria, a stunning favela-Mad-Max-Mix as docufiction, indigenous memory as resistance, migrant sound systems meet Thatcher’s police state, the terror of a house without an exit, a punk film “like a Scorsese film that was beaten to junk in the Bowery for three days”, the fascist rabbit state of Efrafa and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as trans-kaleidoscope.
Dinner is served. Feel cordially invited. It’s GEGENkino-time again at last.
