About

SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA

How can a new kind of cinema be collectively created within a transnational society? SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, the cinema-experiment by bi’bak, explores cinema as a space of social discourse, exchange, and solidarity. The curated film series brings together diverse social communities and connects places both near and geographically distant; it links pasts, presents and futures and moves away from a eurocentric gaze towards transnational, (post-)migrant and postcolonial perspectives. SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA is a different kind of cinema, one simultaneously committed to local and international communities, that understands cinema as an important public sphere of sociality; it considers film history as crucial to the work of cultural memory and is committed to a diversity of film culture and film art. In Haus der Statistik at Berlin-Alexanderplatz, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA builds a bridge between urban practice and film to create a space that opens access, stimulates discussion, educates, moves, provokes and encourages. 

SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA is funded by Haupstadtkulturfonds, Conrad Stiftung and the Programm NEUSTART KULTUR

Past event series can be found in the archive.

Series
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SİNEMANINO

Children's cinema from SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA

Concept by Malve Lippmann and Dr. Martin Ganguly

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Sinema +++

Cinema beyond the Screen

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Sinema +++

In cooperation with Azin Feizabadi, Jan Kulka, Anja Dornieden, Juan David Gonzales Monroy, Ming Poon und Darunee Terdtoontaveedej

SİNEMA+++ expands the spatial possibilities of cinema beyond the screen and explores its artistic and social potential. What is the relationship between the screen and the theatre, the cinematic images and the bodies in the space? How can newly developed projectors, expansive cinematic experiences and alternative forms of social exchange explore the relationship between film image and the bodies on and in front of the screen?  The event series SİNEMA+++ invites artistic projects to experiment with cinema experiences and develop crossover formats that examine the intersections of film, education, and performance.

Finded by Bezirkskulturfonds Mitte

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Common Cold

un.thai.tled Film Festival 2021

Curated by Sarnt Utamachote and Rosalia Namsai Engchuan

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Sounding Womanhood

Feminist Gestures in Film

Curated by Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein & Eirini Fountedaki

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Events

Director Jan Kulka

OV with English subs

Followed by a performance with Jan Kulka

The Archeoscope

Preliminary Exercises
Jan Kulka, Czechia 2016, 16mm found footage, 20 min.

Prefilm
Jan Kulka, Czechia 2016, flickering light, stencils, 25 min.

The Archeoscope is an analogue, hand-operated projecting apparatus for live film performances. Understanding film as an “articulation of light”, the apparatus was created to experiment with and experience the physiology of perception. It can project all standard film formats, as well as various other materials such as adhesive tape, bandages and lace. The only way to witness the projection of The Archeoscope is to attend a live projection and see it with one's own naked eyes, as the phenomena perceived on the screen are technically irreproducible.

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Jan Kulka is a Prague-based experimental filmmaker. His primary focus is the invention of special projection apparatuses for live performances. Rather than telling a story, he tries to target the senses of each spectator directly with light and sound to reveal some of the foundations of our perception.

Director Azin Feizabadi

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Schattenlos – a Film Reading in Two Acts

Shadowless adapts the plot of the novella Peter Schlemihl's Miraculous Story (1813) by Adelbert von Chamisso, which follows a man who sells his shadow to the devil. Inspired by the expressionist film of the 1920s, the collage of drawings, photographs, film clips, found footage recordings and performatively read text excerpts situates the plot in today's Berlin real estate industry. Slowly, a fantastic psychodrama unfolds.

Screenplay, Image Design & Reading: Azin Feizabadi
Co-writer Treatment: Judith Funke
Storyboards: Ghazaleh Saketi
Live Music: Chloe Lula
Dramaturgical Consulting: Moritz Schönecker

Developed in the framework of the Fellowships BS Projects Braunschweig 2019.
Funded by the Research Grant of the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe 2020.

Azin Feizabadi is a filmmaker, visual artist, and educator born in Tehran and raised between Iran and Germany. Feizabadi has screened, staged, published, and exhibited his works in museums, film festivals, biennials, and theaters internationally. He is a member of the Berlinale Shorts selection committee and the programming team for the Kassel Video & Documentary Film Festival.

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The Hot & The Cold

The Hot & The Cold
Ojoboca (Anja Dornieden, Juan David González Monroy), 2018, 40 min., 16mm, slide projection

Comfort Stations 
Ojoboca (Anja Dornieden, Juan David González Monroy), 2018, 26 min., 16mm

Voice: Mary Ocher

The Hot & The Cold is an expanded cinema performance using 16mm and anaglyph 3D slide film, sound, light, and a fog machine. Inspired by phantasmagoria, the 18th century magic lantern spectacle of mysticism and horror, the screening uses the cinematic apparatus as a means to generate a state simultaneously suspended between being caught in the illusion while being aware of its unreality. The Hot & The Cold is screened together with the found footage film Comfort Stations. 

Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy are filmmakers based in Berlin. Under the moniker Ojoboca they have presented their work in a variety of venues and festivals, including Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Anthology Film Archives, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and New York Film Festival.

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OV with English subs

Followed by a performance with Ming Poon and Darunee Terdtoontaveedej

Queer Intervention: Farewell My Concubine
A lecture performance with Ming Poon and Darunee Terdtoontaveedej

霸王别姬 Farewell my Concubine
Chen Kaige, China/Hong Kong 1993 (excerpts)
 
Farewell My Concubine can be considered one of the most iconic queer films in Asian cinematic history for its implications of homosexuality and the gender-fluid performance by Lesley Cheung. However, its portrayal of queer and female trauma remains problematic for many in queer Asian communities where positive representations are still lacking. In this intervention, we reimagine an alternative narrative through a queer feminist lens, unpacking the patriarchy embedded within the film and interrogating how it represents queer and female subjects. 
 
​​Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

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More Event times:

  • 24.10.2021 20:00

Ming Poon is a Berlin-based choreographer and dancer. His focus in choreography lies not only in the organisation of bodies in time and space, but also in how it interrogates their social and political relationality. In particular, he works with the potential within the body of the weak/peripheral to resist and disrupt hegemonic structures, using choreographic strategies that involve decolonisation, vulnerability, care, queerness and failure.

Darunee Terdtoontaveedej is a curator and researcher based in Rotterdam. Trained as an architect and designer, Terdtoontaveedej specialises in cross-disciplinary collaboration through the designer’s lens. She has worked as a curator at CinemAsia Film Festival and the 49th edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).