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.
FR 2023, D: Paul B. Preciado, A: Emma Avena, Arthur, Virginie Despentes, 98’, original with english subtitles, DCP
From a queer perspective, Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando – A Biography from 1928 is a decisive moment of literary modernity, because during its course, the young man Orlando awakens as a woman after a sleep lasting several days. For his experimental documentary film, Paul B. Preciado takes the figure of Orlando as a starting point for devoting himself with his own trans identity and as a playful proposal for about two dozen trans and non-binary people to recount their individual biographies. They slip into the role and comment on their respective transitions, their struggles with their own history and with state and medical-psychiatric regimes of control.
| Sun 17 Sept | UT Connewitz |
| 9 PM | € 6,5 (5,5 reduced) |
Retrospective | ANIMAL REALITIES
É NOITE NA AMÉRICA aka IT IS NIGHT IN AMERICA
BR/FR/IT 2022, D: Ana Vaz, Doc, 66’, original with English subtitles, DCP
Through the night with owls, monkeys, foxes, capybaras and anteaters in Brasília. We dream ourselves into the mysterious, atmospheric film images, shot on expired 16mm material, accompanied by a melancholic, powerful soundtrack. From dreamlike to nightmarish, between documentary, horror and fantasy, IT IS NIGHT IN AMERICA breathlessly follows the animals’ paths, in what seems like an eternally gloomy night. Do the animals invade our cities or do we occupy their habitat?
{IF YOUR BAIT CAN SING THE WILD ONE WILL COME} LIKE SHADOWS THROUGH LEAVES
SG/FI 2021, D: The Migrant Ecologies Project (Konzept: Lucy Davis), Doc, 28’, original with English subtitles, DCP
In the sensory soundscapes of LIKE SHADOWS THROUGH LEAVES, neighbourhoods of nature and urbanism encounter birdcalls and imitations thereof, songs, whispering memories and rustling leaves in Singapore’s oldest, once celebrated social housing complex Tanglin Halt. We cannot see the birds that belong to this place, we can only wait for the sun to pass and follow their shadows. An invigorating, sensual exploration.
Sun 17. Sept | ANIMAL REALITIES UT Connewitz |
| 7 PM | € 6,5 (5,5 reduced) |
Retrospective | ANIMAL REALITIES
ALL THAT BREATHES
UK/IN/US 2022, D: Shaunak Sen, Doc, 97’, original with English subtitles, DCP
“Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air.” In a temporary bird care centre in New Delhi, two Muslim brothers and their cousin are devotedly caring for a majestic bird: the black kite. The black kite is a vehicle to narrate political dimensions that have an impact on the daily lives of Muslim inhabitants. While birds are getting sick and fall from the sky due to severe air pollution, another threat from the right-wing government and its Citizenship Amendment Act is in the wind. We look into the beautiful faces of the kites, follow their trajectories and screech on the ground with rats, insects and frogs. When the “kite brothers” brought their first injured black kite to a veterinary clinic, it was rejected as a “non-vegetarian” bird, because carnivorous birds are considered Muslim and regarded as ritually impure in Hinduism.
| Sun 17. Sept | ANIMAL REALITIES UT Connewitz |
| 17:00 Uhr | € 6,5 (5,5 reduced) |
