German-Greek Filmic Dialogues on the Past and Future
HISTORY PROJECTED
Film screenings program in collaboration with Ethnofest
Through a series of screenings that unfold over the course of 2024, Greek and German short and feature films introduce their own dialects and dialectics, assembling different approaches to a common historical past. Micro-narratives and off-beat, soft testimonies in the plural form; studies on mythology and role-plays with masks of national identity; jigsaw puzzles with fragments from the archive; loud and invisible gestures and artifacts break the distance from historical sources and prompt surprising readings on different sides of the border. In the end, history is brought to the present and projected into the future, whereas the language of cinema renders history a sensation, an instinct, and a collective experience.
Episode 3: Summer Histories
Vathikofto, Ioanna Kryona,2021, 21΄
(In Greek with English subtitles)
Sonnenallee [Sun Alley], Leander Haußmann, 1999, 101΄
(In German with Greek and English subtitles)
Even in its darkest hour, human history is caught in a perpetual summer, when nothing new is found under the bright sun. At the same time, even when nothing is new and everything draws on the past and the known, history feels necessarily addressed to the youth – the agents of the future. A special screening at the prolonged end of the warmest season, comprising two films that manifest the unbearable lightness of being young, reminds us of the value of appropriating unfamiliar sounds till you find your own voice, as well as digging into unknown sensations to shake the habitual human realities.
Anna and Eleni are unwillingly spending their summer in Berlin. On a Saturday evening, they find themselves strolling around, carrying an empty suitcase. They start singing. Soon, they will be confronted with the unpredictably explosive consequences of a single misheard lyric.
The film Sonnenallee ventures a look back to GDR times – it is not a maudlin portrayal, but an unabashedly sentimental and fabulously exaggerated one. It is the story of young people, forbidden music and dances, and of that kind of love that changes everything. 17-year-old Michael lives on Sonnenallee, the longer end of which is in the west and the shorter end in the east of the city. Michael dreams of becoming a big pop star. Politics is of no interest to him – he is neither for nor really against the GDR system. He wants to shake up the organization from within. Then there is Michael's existentialist friend Mario, his buddy Wuschel, who is in danger because of a Rolling Stones record, an uncle from the west who smuggles nylons, and a neighbor who spies for the Stasi – or is he? The only thing Michael knows for sure is that he is in love with Miriam: the wonderful, unattainable Miriam. He would do anything for her.
Ioanna Kryona studied Film Studies and History of Arts at the Freie Universität Berlin. 2015 she completed her first short film Postheimat which premiered at the Drama International Short Film Festival and participated at Athens International Film Festival. Her third short Vathikofto received production funding by the Public Broadcaster ERT and completion funding by the Greek Film Centre. Her first feature project Basalt, in development, received treatment funding by the Greek Film Centre and participated at the MFI SCRIPT2FILM WORKSHOPS 2020/2021. Ioanna has work experience as a programmer having served as a Head of Programming at Hellas Filmbox Berlin. 2019-2020 she got selected as a participant of the German Film Academy’s DFFB programme NEXT WAVE for film professionals. 2022 she participated with her first series project at the Directing Workshop of the Munich Film Academy, whereas 2023 she was a fellow of Oxbelly Episodic for series writers organized by Faliro House.
Leander Haußmann is a German theater and film director. The son of actor Ezard Haußmann and costume designer Doris Haußmann, he was born in Quedlinburg and attended the Ernst Busch theater school in Berlin. Haußmann was the theater director of the city theatre in Bochum (Schauspielhaus Bochum). He also wrote and acted in several plays (1995–2000), and had a role in the Detlev Buck film Jailbirds (1996). His feature film breakthrough came with Sonnenallee in 1999. His second feature, Herr Lehmann, followed in 2003.
