Projects matching: Anthea Kennedy, Ian Wiblin

Synopsis

A poetic memoir and political report, shot in Berlin and Leipzig, and in landscapes around the British Isles. The film’s narrative builds out from the events of the Reichstag Fire in Berlin in 1933 in which the pioneering German-Jewish sound recordist, Ludwig Koch, on whom the film ultimately centres, plays a minor role, placing him and his family in danger. The film is structured in two parts, juxtaposing Koch’s persecution in Nazi Germany with his experiences as a refugee recording bird song and other sounds in Britain.
The film’s images of contemporary urban and rural terrains, and of objects and documents, create a collision between past and present. Shifts in time are further emphasised through the use of Koch’s original sound recordings from Germany and Britain which feature throughout the film.

Synopsis

Based on documents found in Berlin archives, 'Four Parts of a Folding Screen' explores exclusion, statelessness and the legalised theft and sale of everyday family possessions by the National Socialist regime. A voice, enigmatic and sometimes uncertain, foretells of, relates and recalls the routine processes of injustice and their legacy: the creation of a diaspora of household objects, scattered amongst buildings that no longer exist. As the camera probes the secrets of ordinary spaces, streets and buildings around the city of Berlin, semblances of a person and a history begin to emerge and coalesce.
Official Selection Rotterdam International Film Festival 2018 - World premiere

Synopsis

An unseen woman witnesses the ordinary oppression and fear of the early years of National Socialism. She describes the sound of screaming she regularly hears on passing a military barracks whilst walking from her house to the station. Images of the barracks recur throughout the film, suggesting the routine tyranny that precipitates the woman's increasing fear and eventual journey into exile. The film's structure of repetition and retelling foregrounds the way in which her life is stunted by increasing marginalisation and terror. "I’m only just eighteen but sometimes I already feel so old that I think of dying," she writes in a letter to her would-be lover. The View from Our House is based in part on the memories, unsent letters and notebooks of a young photographer who lived in Berlin-Tempelhof. Aspects of her life are mapped out within this small area of Berlin through a succession of haunted images and sounds that imbue place with a sense of memory and history.