New digital restorations

Thanks to the FFE Film Heritage Funding Program, which is financed by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), the FFA and the federal states, we are now able to offer the following films from our archive in digitally restored form: BÖSE ZU SEIN IST AUCH EIN BEWEIS VON GEFÜHL, EKMEK PARASI – GELD FÜR'S BROT, MEIN LEBEN TEIL 2, PRATER und TÖCHTER ZWEIER WELTEN.

BÖSE ZU SEIN IST AUCH EIN BEWEIS VON GEFÜHL

(Fury is a Feeling Too) Cynthia Beatt, FRG 1983, digital file / DCP, OV with English subtitles, 25 min
Cynthia Beatt’s Böse zu sein ist auch ein Beweis von Gefühl (Fury is a Feeling Too) is a personal and cathartic confrontation with her position as a foreigner in Berlin, a city burdened by the weight of its history, during the 1970s and ‘80s, posing questions and provoking reflections on a range of issues related to language, culture, politics, and history. Filmed in the area around Potsdamer Platz, the torn-up area right next to the Wall where post- war buildings grew out of the bomb craters, the film laments the loss of an architectural space whose destruction also meant the disappearance of a cultural context. Shrapnel-pitted facades alternate with rooms activated by staged social altercations about and with Germans scarred by their history. The somber, elegiac music of Maurice Weddington underscores the discordant character of this unsentimental film.

The digital restoration of BÖSE ZU SEIN IST AUCH EIN BEWEIS VON GEFÜHL premiered at the Berlinale Forum Expanded in 2021.

EKMEK PARASI – GELD FÜR'S BROT

Serap Berrakkarasu, FGR 1994, DCP, OV with English subtitles, 100 min
“The vegetables come from the garden behind the house, the fish comes out of a can, and money for bread is earned at the factory. It’s because of this money that they came here. Women from Turkey stand side-by-side with women form Mecklenburg at the conveyor belt of a fish-processing factory in Lübeck. Their hands are stained brown, the pungent smell of fish clings to them, and their arms and backs ache. If these jobs were done by men, machines would have been invented long ago to replace them.” (Linde Fröhlich) The film observes the women at work. In the process, they talk about their lives, their sorrows, their grief, their hopes and dreams, describe the longing for home and the sense of being lost in a place foreign to them.

MEIN LEBEN TEIL 2

(My Life Part 2) Angelika Levi, Germany/Chile 2003, DCP, OV with English subtitles, 93 min
“On my 18th birthday, my mother handed me a piece of paper on which she had written 10 points that she wanted to pass on to me in adulthood. Item one read: ‘The purpose of our lives is to evolve towards perfection. Nothing that is created and good is ever thrown away. Everything builds on previous achievements. You are descended from Joseph’s brother Levi, who lived 3,000 years ago.’ My mother collated and archived her own life. I inherited it and made it into a film that is primarily about perception, my legacy and addressing history. It is an attempt to share what was said and not said in my family, using objects, photos, audio and video material. The film is about trauma and at the same time about how history can be produced, archived, brought into conversations, and categorized, both at the macro- and micro-level, and how I continued to collect in order to tell a story.” (A. Levi)

PRATER

Ulrike Ottinger, Germany/Austria 2007, DCP, OV with English subtitles, 107 min
The life of the oldest amusement park in the world is reflected in the parallel technical and media developments of filmmaking – kaleidoscopically visualized by way of flying camera movements set to texts by Elfriede Jelinek, Josef von Sternberg, Erich Kästner, and Elias Canetti. Within the world of illusion, which connects the ferris wheel to modern attractions that launch visitors out of an ejection seat, there are moments of intimacy: While young men test their strength at the “Watschenmann”, a dancing woman forgets everything around her. Cinema, a space of contemplation, of course began as a fairground attraction. The history of Vienna’s Prater theme park and the work of Ulrike Ottinger have something in common: The world becomes a stage and the stage the world. She reports on show booths and illusion machines, but in doing so also says something about her films. Against the backdrop of dreams of travel and encyclopedic curiosity, but also colonialist imagination, Prater brings the world into its hall of mirrors.

PRATER premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2007.

TÖCHTER ZWEIER WELTEN

(Daughters of Two Worlds) Serap Berrakkarasu, FRG 1990, DCP, OV with English subtitles, 60 min
Two women, a mother and her daughter, one migrated to Germany from Turkey, the other having grown up in Germany, speak about their lives. Both of them describe living between two cultures as an inner dichotomy: “Basically, you don’t know where you belong.” In a parallel sequence, the film compacts the two women’s differing views of life into a dialog between mother and daughter that never actually took place. Director Serap Berrakkarasu met her two subjects when she worked at a women’s shelter in Lübeck. She says, “The young Turkish women here were pretty isolated. I wanted to show the girls and women that they weren’t all alone with their problems. The parents are not monsters. You can understand them; they were shaped by their own upbringing.”

TÖCHTER ZWEIER WELTEN was presented as part of the International Forum of New Cinema in 1991 (nowadays: Berlinale Forum).