Workshop | Walden or living in the woods
Besides all the hanging out in the cinema, you recluses will also get the Chance to catch some fresh air at this year’s GEGENkino. Artist and curator Julia Lazarus will offer a workshop during the festival, where you’ll get the chance to endeavour in different approaches to creatively appropriate the woods of Leipzig with your camera.
Walden or living in the woods
Film workshop with Julia Lazarus
Saturday, Apr 7th, 10am til 7pm (workshop) & Friday, Apr 13th (screening)
This workshop enters the woods around Leipzig in search for the traces of the great-grandfather of political revolt, pioneer of environmentalism and drop-out Henry David Thoreau. In his 1854 book „Walden“ Thoreau describes his life in a self-built log cabin in the woods of Massachusetts, where he lived two and a half years. Text excerpts from this book and other texts by him will be the jumping-off pointfor short filmic studies.
The forest is primarily a mass of trees, vast and always in motion, influenced by wind and clouds and the interplay of light and shadows. In cinema, the forest often stands for the eerie, the impenetrable and becomes a projection surface for the fears of the protagonists. „The woods“, though, can also be staged as home, as a secret place of refuge for dissidents or simply as a protection against the prying eyes of the others. Presently, the forest is also site and object for political debate with regards to global cimate change. At the beginning of the workshop we will take a closer look at filmic representations of the woods, which can also function as impulses for own recordings. Concluding th workshop there will be a screening of the material, results and ideas. A quick apprentice piece for the creative possibilities of the camera in open air environments.
Requirements: Video capturing device (Phone, DSLR camera or camcorder), sturdy shoes.
Registration fee: 30 euros
Registration: workshop[at]gegenkino.de
Julia Lazarus is a filmmaker, artist and curator and lives and works in Berlin. she studied at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin und am California Institute of the Arts Los Angeles. Since 2001 she does videos and films, which are shown in exhibitions and on international festivals. Her films are distributed by Sixpackfilm Wien and e-flux Berlin/New York. For her most recent film project she followed the Turkish activist group „Kuzey Ormanlari Savunmasi“ into the woods North of Istanbul.
