Mind/screen

Film for keynote 1: COMPLAINTS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER

   |  Online streaming only
   | USA 1994, director: Deborah Hoffmann, 44 mins., OV
   | With introduction by Robin Curtis (requested) in German

Director Deborah Hoffmann explores her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and her own frustrations that arise from it. Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter follows two simultaneous developments: the various stages of the increasingly disoriented mother and the daughter’s attempts to understand and help her mother. Hoffmann’s sensitive, humorous and never disrespectful portrayal of the emergence of a new mother-daughter relationship provides an insight into the system of memory, meaning and identity.

Film for keynote 1: FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED

   |Additional on-site screening planned for Wed 5 May, 5.30 pm
   | USA 2012, director: Alan Berliner, 78 mins., OV with German subtitles

In First Cousin Once Removed, Alan Berliner draws a portrait of the poet and professor Edwin Honig who in his last years was affected with Alzheimer’s disease. Honig is the director’s cousin once removed and has also been his role model and mentor for a long time. Berliner follows the course of the disease over the years, but does not assemble a chronology from the film recordings, but a poetic synopsis of most varied stages of the disease and aging process. In this kaleidoscope of pictures, Honig becomes visible as a complex and highly ambivalent person: as a successful intellectual, as a problematic family person and as an old man with no memory.

Film for panel 1: WALTZ WITH BASHIR

   |  Additional on-site screening planned for Fri 7 May, 8 pm
   | Vals im Bashir, ISR/F/D 2008, director: Ari Folman, 90 mins., Hebrew OV with German subtitles
   | With introduction by Markus Kügle (requested) in German

A former Israeli soldier dreams every night that he is being chased by a dog pack. When he confides in a friend, both men see a connection with their experiences in the First Lebanon War. The animated documentary approaches war trauma with fascinating images and powerful music. The episodically narrated film is based on interviews that Folman conducted with old war comrades. These were re-enacted and animated in order to approach the events of the past beyond supposedly factual objectivity.

Trigger warning: depiction of war crimes.

In his presentation, Markus Kügle asks to what extent the film animation technique can function as an aesthetic strategy for appropriating mental illness.

Film for panel 2: DIALOGUES WITH MADWOMEN

   |  Additional on-site screening planned for Thu 6 May, 6 pm
   | USA 1994, director: Allie Light, 90 mins., OV (online) / 16mm, OV with German subtitles (on site)
   | With introduction by Janin Tscheschel in German

Seven women from San Francisco, including the filmmaker, talk about their experiences with manic depression (bipolar disorder), multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder) and schizophrenia, about their creativity and their path of recovery. Open, humorous and with self-ironic distance, they portray their madness as an exit from a world that has become too threatening for them. The film exposes the brutality of family systems and psychiatric institutions and questions concepts of normality and illness. Using interview scenes, home videos, archive material and re-enactment, it paints a complex picture of “madness” as an alternative to stigmatising depictions of mental disorders.

The film received the Emmy Award “as an outstanding interview film of 1994.”

Trigger warning: discussions about sexual violence and child abuse.

In their lecture, Janin Tscheschel and Britta Hartmann discuss the aesthetic strategies of the documentary film to allow an experience of crazy inner states as an artistic and at the same time self-therapeutic, self-empowering process.

Film for panel 3: LITTLE JOE

   | Additional on-site screening planned for Thu 6 May, 8 pm
   | AT / UK / D 2019, director: Jessica Hausner, 105 mins., OV with German subtitle
   | With a pre-recorded film talk with the director and Sabrina Gärtner in German

The botanist Alice is working on a new flower breed with therapeutic effects that will make people happy. When Alice secretly brings such a flower home for her son, she ignores the warnings of her colleague Ella and firmly believes in the positive effects of her creation. But as people around them show behavioural changes, the signs increase that the deep red flower might not only bring luck. With intense colours and calm settings, Jessica Hausner stages a paranoia story with borrowings from the science fiction genre which she transfers into her own style.

In her presentation, Sabrina Gärtner analyses the film characters and questions the pursuit of mental health.

Film for panel 3: TARNATION

   | Online streaming only
   | USA 2003, director: Jonathan Caouette, 88 mins., OV

Both filmmaker and protagonist, Jonathan Caouette chronicles the crises of his family lasting for three generations. At the age of eleven, he already began to stage himself in front of the movie camera and to get in contact with his psychically destabilised mother. Processing his childhood traumata, he in an astoundingly inventive and effective manner arranges old pictures, home movies, voicemail messages and self-interviews. The result is a highly emotional collage somewhere between video diary and experimental film, a self-therapeutical attempt to come to terms with his past that is of bitter intensity and raw gracefulness.

Trigger warning: discussions about sexual violence, not-consented hospitalisation, child abuse, and suicide; sensory overload

Petra Anders‘s talk unfolds the ways of how cinematography, editing and use of music increase our awareness of watching mental crises.

Richard Warden presents: THE CLOSER WE GET

   | Online streaming only
   | UK 2015, director: Karen Guthrie, 87 mins., OV with English subtitles
   | National premiere

The wife’s stroke prompts Ian Guthrie to move back in with her, although they have been living apart for years. The four children, now grown up, including the filmmaker, also spend more time in the parents’ home on the Scottish west coast taking loving care of their mother. Mother and daughter resume the film idea they had before the stroke: working through what had broken up the family and what was caused by the father’s absence during his several years abroad in Djibouti and its consequences. The filming visibly revives the mother. However, the distance between father and daughter threatens to become greater “the closer they get” to each other.

This poetically compelling family portrait opens up the complexity of a family, its care-giving, its silence and its secrets in the context of neo-colonial negotiations of British-African relations.

The film – also a German premiere – is presented as part of Richard Warden’s curated film programme on family, loss and first person documentary storytelling.

“In a story told with unflinching honesty and written with poetic precision, this film exemplifies cinematic craft, and a generosity of approach resulting in admirable subtlety and nuance.” (Jury statement for Best International Documentary Feature at Hot Docs Festival Toronto)

“In the adroitly observed The Closer We Get, a family crisis turns into an autobiographical detective story when the film director Karen Guthrie returns home to care for her mother” (Kate Muir, The Sunday Times)

“Although her story is unusual, anyone with more everyday experience of separated or incapacitated parents will recognise the strange stresses, strains and areas of silence with which Guthrie wrestles.” (Mark Kermode, The Guardian)

Richard Warden presents: VIVIAN, VIVIAN

   | Online streaming only
   | In het hoofd van mijn zusje, NL 2016, director: Ingrid Kamerling, 54 mins, OV with English subtitles
   | National premiere

Filmmaker Ingrid Kamerling explores the question of what was going on in the mind of her sister Vivian, who unexpectedly ended her life at the age of 24. Vivian was a beautiful, energetic young woman and world explorer. She was, like many in her age, searching for who she was and what she could contribute to the world. A very personal story that blurs the lines between documentary, diary and dream.

The film – also a German premiere – is presented as part of Richard Warden’s curated film programme on family, loss and first person documentary storytelling.

“Vivian, Vivian uses innovative narrative tricks, managed to let the poignancy provoked by the tragic recount flow and to tell this story in a very clean way.” (La Repubblica)

“It journeys from clouded, mesmerising dreamscapes to the urban arena of nighttime Utrecht. In doing so it maps the previously untouched path laid by the suicide of Kamerling’s sister. At its core, this film is about a woman’s journey through grief.” (Kirsty Strang-Roy für SMHAF)

Richard Warden presents: THE THIRD DAD + WATERFALL

The Third Dad

   | Online streaming only
   | UK 2015, director: Theresa Moerman Ib, 10 mins., English/German OV with English subtitles
   | In attendance of the filmmaker on Fri, 5 May, 2:30 pm
   | National premiere

Ten years after breaking all ties with her father, and seven years after his death, a daughter sets out not only to find his grave, but also redemption. Cees Moerman was a poet and photographer whose alcoholism hindered him from caring for his daughter. Winner of BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award, The Third Dad merges archive material, new footage and an immersive soundscape to a personal journey that interweaves memory, self-discovery and a desperate attempt at reconciliation.

Waterfall

   | Online streaming only
   | UK 2016, director: Tom Lock Griffiths, 19 mins., OV with English subtitles
   | National premiere

How can memories of trauma and loss become embedded in the landscape? In Waterfall, Tom Lock Griffiths adresses this question after his mother’s suicide. Starting from the scattering of ashes of a loved one at a Welsh waterfall, the film takes us on a journey inside our most painful thoughts and finally to a place of hope and recovery. Using the metapher of flux, the essay film seeks to fathom what it is that makes connection, resonances and both the ubiquity and invisibility of memory offering a poignant whirl as alternative to traditionally linear journeys through grief.

The short films – both also a German premiere – are presented as part of Richard Warden’s curated film programme on family, loss and first person documentary storytelling.

Silent film with live music: A PAGE OF MADNESS

   | On-site screening only, planned for Sat 8 May, 8 pm
   | Kurutta Ippeiji, J 1926/72, director: Kinugasa Teinosuke, 60 mins.
   | With live music accompaniment by David Eßer
   | With introduction by Tobias Dietrich

An old seaman takes a concierge job in a rural mental hospital to take care of his interned wife. Their daughter’s engagement announcement triggers scraps of memories and a vortex of thoughts within the mother – and worries about the prejudices of the family of the groom within the father. In his unsuccessful attempts to free his wife, he has to face the chief doctor and other inmates. When he assumes to recognise the future son-in-law in one of them, he himself begins to doubt his perception.

“A work that has advanced a step ahead of Dr. Caligari,” the film critics read already in 1926. The film was made by the Japanese avant-garde group Shinkankaku-ha, the school of new perception, and masterfully combines the script of Kawabata Yasunari (1968 Nobel Prize for Literature) with innovative camera technology and Eiko Minami’s dance talent. Lost for a long time, the film has been rediscovered in 1972 and only survived as a fragment. Nonetheless, it impressively illustrates the artist’s claim to combine modern narration and innovative play of forms and light and to overcome the boundaries between reality and folly.

David Eßer from Hamburg has been active in various projects in Germany’s musical landscape for over ten years. By setting the film to music using the principle of sound synthesis, he enters into a dialogue with the synthesiser and develops his own vocabulary that crosses the possibilities of the linguistic and visual.