We are pleased to announce Travelling on Atypical Orbits, a very special Mini Film Festival, with six films from the 18th Berlinale Forum Expanded, which is a section of the Berlin International Film Festival, independently curated and organised by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin.
The programme is presented and moderated by Bangalore-based filmmaker and curator Shai Heredia. The six films are idiosyncratic, highly personal explorations of individual and collective historical trajectories. Employing a vast range of cinematic approaches from essayistic found footage collages to documentary investigations to absurdist narratives, their makers search for ways of accessing lost or lingering memories of families, societies and institutions, unearthing fraught narratives and forging tender connections across time and space.
Programme 1 Black Strangers - Dan Guthrie Desert Dreaming - Abdul Halik Azeez Zwischenwelt (In-between World) - Cana Bilir-Meier Mangosteen - Tulapop Saenjaoren
Total running time: 78 min.
Programme 2 Es gibt keine Angst (Afraid doesn't exist) - Anna Zett That Day, On the River - Lei Lei
Total running time: 71 min.
BLACK STRANGERS
Director: Dan Guthrie / United Kingdom / 2022 / 8 min. / Original version / Original language: English
An intimate filmic conversation on belonging: After seeing him mentioned on a Bishop’s Transcript held in Gloucestershire Archives, Dan goes for a walk in the woods in search of Daniel, a man buried in Nympsfield on December 31, 1719 and described on the document as “a black stranger”.
Dan Guthrie is an artist-filmmaker, film programmer, and writer whose practice often investigates and interrogates historical and contemporary Black presences and mis-presences with an interest in examining how they manifest themselves in rural areas. Recent presentations of his work include Whitstable Biennale, MIRROR (Arts University Plymouth), the Independent Cinema Office and LUX’s “Right of Way” screening tour. He is an awardee of the 2022 Michael O’Pray Prize for new writing on the moving image, part of the programming team for the 18th edition of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and a member of Stroud District Council’s Community Representation Taskforce.
DESERT DREAMING
Director: Abdul Halik Azeez, Sri Lanka / 2022 / 12 min. / Original version with English subtitles / Original language: English, Tamil DESERT DREAMING began with inquiring into all that is missing, yet forms one’s consciousness in the family portrait and transforming spaces of a familial home. This film is part of an ongoing project that traces labor migration to the Middle East and the micro impacts of large shifts such as the neoliberalization of the economy in the ‘70s, the civil war that began in the ‘80s, and subsequent postwar transformations in Sri Lanka.
Abdul Halik Azeez’s work examines technologies of power as mediated through contemporary culture, narratives of progress, lived experiences, and media. His multidisciplinary practice predominantly draws from post-war transformations that have impacted Sri Lanka, such as the effects of gentrification, tourism, and renewed ultranationalist politics. Azeez also works collaboratively with The Packet and other artists from Sri Lanka and elsewhere.
ZWISCHENWELT (IN-BETWEEN WORLD)
Director: Cana Bilir-Meier / Germany / 2023 / 18 min. / Original version with English subtitles / Original language: German, Bengali, English
In 1986 the Muhammad Iqbal Monument was erected in Munich, commemorating the poet, philosopher, and mentor of the independent postcolonial state of Pakistan. Iqbal, who completed his doctorate in Munich in 1907, lived in Bavaria for many years and died in Pakistan in 1938. In 1962 Gani Bilir arrived in Kiel as a so-called Gastarbeiter. His payslips, which are visible in the film, are discovered by the filmmaker in the family archive. They are a document of the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers and their lack of recognition as humans in Germany. A variety of places, moments, and snatches of historical memory are woven in the film into a particular decolonial view of our time.
Cana Bilir-Meier studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, at the School Friedl Kubelka for Independent Film in Vienna, and at Sabancı University in Istanbul. In 2021 she was guest professor for art education at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. She works as a filmmaker, artist, and art teacher in Munich and Vienna. In 2018 she co-founded the Initiative for Commemorating Semra Ertan and in 2020 co-edited the volume of poetry: “Semra Ertan. Mein Name ist Ausländer/Benim Adım Yabancı.” Her works have been exhibited at the Kunstverein Hamburg; the Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; at the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin; Nürnberg Staatstheater and NS-Dokumentationszentrum, Munich, and at numerous film festivals.
MANGOSTEEN
Director: Tulapop Saenjaroen / Thailand / 2022 / 40 min. / Original version with English subtitles / Original language: Thai, German MANGOSTEEN tells the story of Earth, a young man who returns to his hometown, Rayong, where his sister, Ink, runs a fruit processing factory. During a casual meeting, Earth finds out that his definition of the term “future” is drastically different from his sister’s. The more he tries to involve himself in the fruit juice business, the less he feels needed there. Earth eventually decides to distance himself from the family operation and resumes his old hobby, writing a violent, psychic, irrational, abstract, gory, and unrealistic novel.
Tulapop Saenjaroen is an artist and filmmaker whose practice encompasses performance, video and film. His recent shorts interrogate the correlations between image production and production of subjectivity as well as the paradoxes intertwining control and freedom in late capitalism. Saenjaroen’s works have been shown in film festivals, screenings, exhibitions, internationally including Locarno Film Festival; IFFR, Rotterdam; DOK Leipzig; Images Festival, Toronto; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Saenjaroen also co-founded the experimental film and media screening series “Rapid Eye Movement” in Bangkok.
ES GIBT KEINE ANGST (AFRAID DOESN´T EXIST)
Director: Anna Zett / Germany / 2023 / 31 min. / Original version with English subtitles / Original language: German
An expiring police state is the setting for the pulsating short film thriller ES GIBT KEINE ANGST (Afraid Doesn’t Exist). Based on her own childhood experiences from before 1990, the artist Anna Zett has assembled video and audio material from the Berlin Archive of the GDR Opposition into an intense and poetic archive drama. Between picture and sound the film opens up an associative space to connect anew with experiences of violence that are difficult to make sense of today, while at the same time documenting an act of political resistance that seems extraordinarily effective considering German history.
Anna Zett is a Berlin-based artist and writer. Centering dialog and play, her time-based, emotional, analytical and often participatory work questions systems of control, and makes space for new relations to emerge at sites of loss and damage. Since 2018, her quest for feminist practices of world-making set a focus on how to personally make sense of embodied legacies of the GDR, which also led to the development of the format “Postsocialist Group Improvisation.” Anna Zett’s video works have been shown in the international art and film context since her first release in 2014.
THAT DAY, ON THE RIVER
Director: Lei Lei / People's Republic of China / 2023 / 39 min. / Original version with English subtitles / Original language: Mandarin
In Lei Lei’s THAT DAY, ON THE RIVER, newspaper clippings, historical photographs, and a film about a female basketball player serve as the source material for an exploration of his father’s childhood in provincial China. “‘In fact, I’ve been doing well in school since I was a child,’ my father smiled. In 2016, my father and I traveled to Ningdu by bus to do preliminary research for my animated feature film SILVER BIRD AND RAINBOW FISH. We did the field recording and looked for the house where he lived as a boy and the bridge he walked on to the school. During the trip, we talked about his childhood memories and things he wasn’t good at.” Lei Lei
Born in China, Lei Lei is an independent animator and artist, graduated from Tsinghua University with a master’s degree in animation. Since 2018, he has been teaching animation at CalArts, Los Angeles. His works include the award-winning short animation films THIS IS LOVE (2010) and RECYCLED (2013), as well as many other shorts selected in international festivals. He has also had solo exhibitions in Beijing and Vienna, and was part of group exhibitions among others in Singapore, Netherlands, Canada, and China. BREATHLESS ANIMALS, his first feature-length film, made its world premiere at the Berlinale Forum 2019.
Started in 2006 and now in its 18th year, the Berlinale Forum Expanded comprises exhibitions, film programmes, performances and discursive events, presenting works and makers from a wide range of cinematic practices including visual art, theatre, performance, music and the media. In combination with the impetus given by politics and society, these works create a discursive framework of a deliberately international character which has the potential to grasp cinema anew and change it in lasting ways.
Part of Forum Expanded's mission is to facilitate the visibility of the selected films beyond the context of the Berlinale, which takes place annually in February: Many of the works presented in the festival become part of the collection of the Arsenal, joining the eclectic living archive of more than 10,000 films, maintained and distributed through Arsenal Distribution. Forum Expanded is curated by Ala Younis and Uli Ziemons (co-heads) together with Karina Griffith and Shai Heredia.
Shai Heredia is a filmmaker, curator, and founding director of EXPERIMENTA, the moving image art biennial of India. She has curated film programmes worldwide and was the programmer of the 65th Robert Flaherty Seminar. Heredia has co-directed I Am Micro (2012) and An Old Dog’s Diary (2015) which have exhibited at prestigious film festivals and art venues internationally. Both films have won awards including a National Film Award and a BFI London Film Festival award. Heredia has contributed to journals such as The Moving Image Review and Art Journal and PUBLIC and was the co-editor of the Loud Mess issue of NANG magazine. Heredia is currently on the curatorial team of Berlinale Forum Expanded. She is based in Bangalore, where she runs the Graduate Programme in Curatorial Practices at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
