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 4: Building History
Manodopera, Loukianos Moshonas, 2016, 30΄
(In Greek with English subtitles)
Western, Valeska Grisebach, 2017, 121΄
(In German with Greek and English subtitles)
Relations of masculinity, struggle for dominance, gentrification, migration, sovereignty, solidarity, center and periphery unfold on both sides of different borders. A feature film captures the condition of a power plant construction site in a Bulgarian village very close to Greece; a short film is “built” in the heart of Athens in a strange gray zone shaped by the economic collapse, in an apartment that a young bourgeois decides to renovate with the help of an Albanian worker. Films made in the late phase of a past crisis – or the beginning of a new one that is here to stay.
Down the lower-ground floor, as seasons go by, an Albanian worker and a Greek upper-class young man redo a flat. High on the rooftop, as nightfalls go by, the young man and his friends reconsider the world.
A group of German construction workers begin building a hydroelectric power station in a remote region of Bulgaria. Even though relations with a nearby village’s inhabitants are difficult – not least because of language barriers that are initially almost impossible to overcome – Meinhard succeeds in making friends with the locals. His colleague Vincent tracks these rapprochements with jealous mistrust. With Western, Valeska Grisebach tells the story of migrant workers in foreign countries with the conditions reversed: the Germans here are foreigners, and overcoming borders is no easier for them than for their colleagues who come to Germany as outsiders.
Loukianos Moshonas was born in Athens in 1985. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Lyon and from the Fresnoy Studio national des arts contemporains. His films were shown and awarded at Locarno (Switzerland), at New Directors/New Films (New York), at Angers (France), Documenta Madrid (Spain), Janela (Brazil), Olhar de Cinema (Brazil), Vila do Conde (Portugal), Mar de Plata (Argentina). His short film Jeunes hommes à la fenêtre won the European Film Academy award for Best European Film at the Locarno International Film Festival.
Valeska Grisebach studied Philosophy and German Studies in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. In 1993, she began studying to be a director at the Viennese Film Academy under Peter Patzak, Wolfgang Glück, and Michael Haneke. Her second feature film, Longing, premiered in 2006 in the Berlinale Competition. The film received several awards, including the Special Jury Award in Buenos Aires and the Special Jury Award at the Warsaw International Film Festival.
