Fiktionsbescheinung Program 1

The „Fiktionsbescheinigung“ explores the question of how culture in general and cinema in particular are related to society and racism. It is dedicated to the work of Black directors and directors of colour in Germany and sees itself as an experiment in shared curatorial responsibility that also seeks to shine a spotlight on a chapter of German film production that has been unfairly neglected. 
 
The film selection was put together by curators Enoka Ayemba and Biene Pilavci, supported by Karina Griffith, Jacqueline Nsiah, Can Sungu and the Berlinale Forum selection committee.

Fremd. Yaban.

Right at the start, Adem injures himself on a plant. The thorn is stuck deep in his finger. Right at the start of a visit from Meryem, his mother. She has a hard time with the stairs.
With just a few precise strokes, director and writer Hakan Savaş Mican creates a vivid portrait of just how much distance now lies between mother and son. Meryem’s visit puts Adem’s sociocultural self-image to the test. An architecture student, he sees himself as belonging to a different class than the migrant worker milieu to which he ascribes his mother. With a keen grasp of situational comedy, FREMD challenges its protagonist, played by Ismail Sahin.
The film was shot almost entirely within one small apartment using a cool color palette. Despite its formal austerity, this chamber drama has considerable warmth, thanks to the character of Meryem, played by Sema Poyraz.
Equally remarkable is Hakan Savaş Mican’s masterful use of objects. There is that thorn in the finger at the start and a pair of slippers left outside a room at the end – an everyday object that conveys deep feeling nonetheless. (Biene Pilavci)

In der Wüste

Winter in West Berlin in the mid 1980s. Two artists, Fernando and Timur, share a dump of a flat off a gloomy courtyard in Kreuzberg. The Wall looms nearby, the refrigerator is empty, the ceiling leaks, and Chilean-in-exile Fernando is in such a funk that he can’t even bring himself to open a letter from home.
Rafael Fuster Pardo chose to base his feature debut IN DER WÜSTE on a story by Chilean author Antonio Skármeta and to work with a powerful ensemble of non-professional actors whose own biographies are marked by (post-)migration. With economy and precision, Fuster Pardo paints a picture of the life of a starving artist. Berlin appears as a desert of wastelands and rejection, as a city that for all its affluence is not free and egalitarian, but rather restrictive and cold. Not everyone is granted entry. And yet the film never allows its bright mood to darken; after all, crises are there so that we can distract ourselves from them. In the lead-up to Christmas, the city manages to get back on good terms with Fernando and Timur when they attend a Jocelyn B. Smith concert: for minutes on end, her performance of “Midnight Lover” electrifies both characters and audience alike. (Biene Pilavci)