How We Became Who We Are
Wednesday 9.11.2011 / 17:30 h / BALi Cinemas
What shapes a person is often founded in childhood or even further along the family history. Memory can either preserve a collective history and secure it for the future or it can become transfigured through a prescribed and unchangeable construction thereby turning it into a relict. This program shows three very personal takes on family history, descent and the past, on Jewish and Danube Swabian identity, on homeland and diaspora. Three takes that break up clichés and challenge their respective cultures.
CAMP
CAMP is a 3-part, single channel, video essay exploring the secrets that underscore my personal relationship to Jewish history and culture. Through a look at 3 camp environments, I engage with a queer re-telling of the traditional Purim story, the censored passages in Anne Frank's diary, and a haircut given to me by my grandfather in order to reveal the ways in which these secrets haunt the surface of our cultural moments. CAMP is framed through a play on the word ‘camp’ utilizing a camp sensibility amidst an analysis of temporary built environments. Through this frame I engage with what we choose to keep hidden in these contemporary moments, and point to a larger fear of speaking out against injustice as a cause for silence.
A Manual to Change the Past
In this autobiografical film the filmmaker Antje Engelmann is the subject of her own investigation. In this work of memory and self-awareness, Engelmann questions her family background and cultural origin on various different levels. Investigative directed documentary material from the past 10 years and other found footage are carefully weaved with super-8 family footage to tell her personal story growing up in the vanishing Danube Swabian culture. The film focuses on the concept of home as either a simple geographical position or as a more complex inner, emotional place. It deals with the sociological question of how knowledge is developed in society, and the concept of pictorial memory build-up. Exactly how much of the latter is real is not addressed, however.
Movement within the film is both metaphorical and physical: not only representing the motion of time within history, but also using interludes of dance to physically express cultural concepts. Engelmann does not just travel within her personal history, nor does she just interview family members and an antropologist of the “Danube Swabian Museum“ in Ulm; but she is also travels to a danube swabian colony in Brasil. This colony is the only place on Earth where Danube Swabian is spoken – a dialect once spoken by Engelmann´s own great-grandmother.
A MANUAL TO CHANGE THE PAST is both a philosophical and a humurous film. It ends with the attempt to transfer cultural roots from the past into the present and invites us, the audience, to dance in traditional clothes in a club.
10 kurze dokumentarfilme über das haus meiner kindheit
10 SHORT DOCUMENTARIES ABOUT MY CHILDHOOD HOME recounts how the filmmaker and her sisters struggle to reach common ground while dealing with the sale of the family house and their mother’s move to an assisted living situation. Mixing observational footage, personal reflection, Brechtian re-enactments with masks, and family photos, the film is an intimate exploration of familial relationships, childhood and the passage of time.