GER 2001, D: Helga Reidemeister, Doc, 104′, OV with English subtitles, 35mm

Inside views of a usually sealed place. Using the example of “Gotteszell” in Baden-Wuerttemberg as a microcosm, Helga Reidemeister undertakes an examination of the institution “Women’s Prison”, tracing questions of guilt, punishment and atonement, not least letting the prisoners have their say. Six women tell of their lives before incarceration and of problems like being separated from their children. Besides the ones sentenced to relatively short sentences – mostly because of drug offences – the prisoners sometimes serving lifelong sentences because of homicide and manslaughter also speak out.  

GER/FR 2005, R: Johann Feindt & Tamara Trampe, Doc, 92′, OV with German voice-over, Digi Beta

How do soldiers come back from war? This is the one question that accompanies the documentary WHITE RAVENS, made in the early 2000s. We get to know young men, whom Tamara Trampe and Johann Feindt show as perpetrators as well as victims of the war in Chechnya: broken returnees, but also concerned parents looking for their missing sons and overworked employees in the Moscow office of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia. In WHITE RAVENS, the directors’ ability to approach the victims and encounter their silence becomes evident.

GER 1990, D: Renate Sami, Doc, 93′, OV with German subtitles, 16mm 

With WITH PYRAMIDS, Renate Sami has shot a travelogue of a far away country that is composed of diverse voices, sounds, faces and interiors. In this, rough edges remain, nothing is harmoniously rounded. By car and together with Sami, we explore Egyptian desert and city landscapes shot on 8mm and 16mm, while the soundtrack presents different texts to us. These deal with legendary city foundings for instance, but also give an insight into stories of Egyptian women reporting on their painful experiences of marriage and generally on being a woman in a patriarchal society.

ES/CO 2021, D: Helena Girón, Samuel M. Delgado, A: Nuria Lestegás, Sara Ferro, Xoán Reices, Valentín Estévez, 75′, OV with English subtitles, DCP

They carry death. And still try to escape it. On the Canary Islands, a group of convicts eludes the fleet of Christopher Columbus and flees with a giant sail across the volcanic solitude. Meanwhile in Galicia, a woman is rescued and brought to a healer by her sister. The figures are particles of a bigger cosmos, in which the sun is torturing, the wind is biting, the earth is belching out bloody rocks, the sea is looking for bodies that have been promised to it and the ships keep on carrying death – into the “New World”. How is history told? Who carries meaning? A vigorous contemplation about the fragility of history and the role of gender in it.

IT/AR/FR 2021, D: Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis, A: Gabriele Silli, Maria Alexandra Lungu, Severino Sperandio, 106′, OV with English subtitles, DCP

Italy, today. A handful of older hunters with rugged faces gather for a meal in convivial company, telling each other stories of Luciano, a character of the local folklore. From this documentary setting, THE TALE OF KING CRAB leaps into the life of Luciano – or maybe better: a version of it. Luciano, it is said, was a man of the late 18th or early 19th century with a preference for alcohol and a woman from the village. After having committed a crime, he is exiled to Tierra del Fuego and there, sets off searching for a mythical treasure. Neo-realist charm, aesthetic resorts to a pre-industrial age, quirky western: in this, the stunning camera work playfully is on track of the fever dream that cinema has always been.