Director Senka Domanović Serbia / Croatia 2018
87 Min., OV with English subs
Director Emek Bizim İstanbul Bizim initiative Turkey 2016
48 Min., OV with English subs
Followed by a talk with Kaspar Aebi and Senem Aytaç
Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung @ SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
Film programme and discussions with a focus on Belarus
Curated by Marina Naprushkina and Agnieszka Kilian
Films with absent protagonists, after the GDR, after 1990
Curated by Anna Zett and Philipp Goll
Curated by Sebahattin Şen
Curated by Necati Sönmez
Fields of action in the environmental crisis
Curated by Sarnt Utamachote, Malve Lippmann, Rosalia Namsai Engchuan and Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein & Eirini Fountedaki
Curated by Özge Calafato
Curated by Eirini Fountedaki, Cornelia Lund & Holger Lund (fluctuating images), Philip Rizk and Shohreh Shakoory
Curated by Kaspar Aebi
From the 1900s, Berlin was the largest industrial location in Germany. Yet behind the visible work in the factories lay the invisible work at home. Cooking, caring, cleaning, educating, sex - or as Silvia Federici and Nicole Cox wrote in 1975: “Housework, in fact, is much more than house cleaning. It is servicing the wage earner physically, emotionally, sexually, getting him ready to work day after day for the wage.” Accounting the Household! takes a look at homes, bedrooms and kitchens in the industrial northwest of Berlin. The films show care work and reproductive work between economic coercion and refusal, domestic community and abandonment, children and childlessness, marriage, divorce and social retreat, entangled in dependencies, resistance and social expectations. A special focus is on the years of change from the early sixties to the eighties. After industrial work had dominated everyday life in the north of West Berlin for almost a century, the region's largest employers closed their plants within just twenty years following the construction of the Berlin Wall. What happens to the “servicing of the wage earner” in a time of great uncertainty, between mass layoffs and the construction of the Wall, against the backdrop of the emerging Second Wave Feminism?
Funded by Aktionsfonds QM Soldinerstr
Kaspar Aebi is a curator, author, film and media scholar trained in social studies and cultural anthropology. His main interests are pop culture, the politics of architecture, the intersection of neoliberalism and conservative/right wing ideologies, feminist theory, and documentary filmmaking. For the film blog Jugend ohne Film Kaspar edited a special issue on architecture and neoliberalism. In his master thesis he focuses on spatial intermediation and sheltering through cinema architecture. Kaspar coordinates the film copies and edits the program texts at Sinema Transtopia.
Curated by Popo Fan
Curated by Sarnt Utamachote and Rosalia Namsai Engchuan
Curated by Popo Fan, Tobias Hering, Malve Lippmann, Branka Pavlovic, Can Sungu, Sarnt Utamachote and Florian Wüst
Director Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel Turkey 2019
57 min, OV with English subs
Followed by a talk with Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel
Director Furqan Faridi, Ashfaque EJ, Shaheen Ahmed and Vishu Sejwal India 2019
43, OV with English subs
Followed by a talk with Shivramkrishna Patil and Susanne Gupta
Contract Labor and Internationalism in the GDR
Curated by Tobias Hering and Sun-ju Choi
Romani Perspectives in Film
Curated by Hamze Bytyçi
Curated by Amal Ramsis
Curated by Malve Lippmann and Can Sungu
Queer Feminist Rebels
Curated by Pembe Hayat KuirFest / Pink Life QueerFest, Esma Akyel and Esra Özban
Director Afraa Batous Syria, Lebanon 2015
82 min., OV with English subs
Followed by a talk with Lisa Jöris and Afraa Batous
Chinese X Queer X Film
Curated by Popo Fan
The Figure of the Migrant
Curated by Ömer Alkın
Curated by Necati Sönmez
Shifting Narratives
Curated by Florian Wüst
Narratives and Memories of Transnational Families
Curated by Malve Lippmann and Can Sungu
By Esra Özban
Syrian Society and Politics before and after 2011
By Amer Katbeh
Perspectives on Mobility in African Film
By Enoka Ayemba
By Marie Rasper and Hanna Döring
Mobilities between tourism and migration
By Malve Lippmann and Can Sungu
By Florian Wüst
Parent's and Children's Fates in the Context of Labor Migration
By Malve Lippmann and Can Sungu
Social Criticism in German-Turkish Migration Film
By Can Sungu
By Branka Pavlovic
OV with English subs
Followed by a talk with Can Sungu
Director Carmen Losmann Germany 2011
90 min., OV with English subs
Director Helga Reidemeister BRD 1978
121 Min., OV
“Besides, this is bullshit anyway!” After twenty years of marriage, Irene Rakowitz divorces her husband who lives a few floors down. She fights for self-determination and hurls at her daughter: “We raise kids, we run a huge household, we serve the man. For nothing! And when we’re divorced, then it’s zilch, nothing! When I work as a housemaid, I’m doing the same work. Here, I am a housemaid for nothing!” Helga Reidemeister, who worked as a social worker on site at Märkisches Viertel, is involved with the difficult search for independence. Mostly standing in solidarity to Irene, she is, however, sometimes also antagonistic to her. The question that remains outstanding: “Okay, I got divorced, I have my freedom. So what can I do with it now?”
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder BRD 1975
120 Min., OV
Followed by a presentation with Bettina Köhler
After her husband first killed his boss and then himself in reaction to an announced mass layoff, “Mother Küster” is appropriated by all and everybody for media attention. She is photographed at the stove by a tabloid reporter, turned into a case study at the party congress of the German Communist Party DKP, and used as an identification figure by an anarchist group at a hostage-taking at the tabloid’s office. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s loose adaptation of the proletarian silent movie Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness shifts the plot from the red Wedding of the 1920s to bourgeois Frankfurt in the 1970s, and thus to the culture wars between the BILD, DKP and RAF. A reflection on the attention economy of gender roles between the political fronts of the 1970s.
With a surprise film afterwards!
Bettina Köhler is a film scholar and public historian. Her research interests include visual history, film history and the staging of history in film.
Director Eberhard Fechner BRD 1969
62 Min., 16mm, OV
Grüntaler Straße 59a, small staircase: Klara Heydebreck lived here for 59 years until she committed suicide in March 1969. Starting from the police report, a search for a life that remains fragmentary begins. Documents from the estate and conversations with relatives and neighbours are used to reconstruct the historical, economic and social conditions of a woman who did not want to live up to conventional expectations, who never married and was therefore ridiculed as a “damsel-in-waiting”. When, at the end, a letter that has never been sent is read, the main thing that remains is sadness: “Loneliness can be very beautiful when you have had enough of your dear fellow world once again. But a lack of essential necessities is the devil's chicanery”.
Director Sohrab Shahid Saless BRD 1975
111 Min., OV
Followed by a presentation with Vivien Buchhorn
Nine-year-old Michael eats breakfast, goes to school, hangs around and runs errands for the neighbour. Together with his single mother, who works as a prostitute, he lives in a small apartment in Wedding. The different rhythms of their everyday life pass each other by and are only held together by the ticking of the clock on the wall. In sober shots, director Sohrab Shahid Saless, who emigrated Iran in 1974, shows the boy's routine, which repeats itself daily, until one day he notices his mother receiving a client.
Vivien Kristin Buchhorn is a film scholar and art historian. Her research interest is in transnational cinematographies and works of art and their archiving. In addition to her academic work, she works as a curator, accompanies film projects and regularly publishes film and exhibition reviews. Sohrab Shahid Saless' films have interested her since the conception of retrospectives in Berlin and Tehran.
