Curated by Sarnt Utamachote, Popo Fan and Ragil Huda
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.
Curated by Sarnt Utamachote, Popo Fan and Ragil Huda
Berlinale Forum Special Programme
Curated by Can Sungu, Karina Griffith, Jacqueline Nsiah, Biene Pilavci and Enoka Ayemba
Children's cinema from SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
Concept by Malve Lippmann and Dr. Martin Ganguly
Curated by LaborBerlin e.V.
Iranian Cinema Before 1979
Curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht
Curated by Can Sungu and Malve Lippmann
Cinema beyond the Screen
un.thai.tled Film Festival 2021
Curated by Sarnt Utamachote and Rosalia Namsai Engchuan
Feminist Gestures in Film
Curated by Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein & Eirini Fountedaki
Archive screenings with films from Navina Sundaram
Curated by Merle Kröger and Mareike Bernien
Symposium, Screenings, Talks
(Post-)Yugoslavian experiences
Curated by Borjana Gaković and Madeleine Bernstorff
Curated by Darunee Terdtoontaveedej
Stories from the Periphery presents a multi-faceted collection of stories and experiences by and about women, queer, non-binary, and transgender individuals with East, Southeast Asian, and diasporic backgrounds. Told on their own terms, each story reveals personal journeys of becoming, contemplation, and remembering through filmmaking. In a world where the omission of men and the male gaze is often politicized, Stories from the Periphery offers a tender view of alternative imaginaries, determinations, reconciliations, and memories, bringing to light perspectives which are often neglected and silenced.
Funded by Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa
Darunee Terdtoontaveedej is a curator based in Rotterdam. Trained as an architect and designer, Terdtoontaveedej specializes in cross-disciplinary collaboration. She has worked as a curator at CinemAsia Film Festival and the 49th edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). She is the co-founder of Non Native Native, a cultural platform for aliens.
Perspectives from the South
Curated by Nafiseh Fathollahzadeh and Berke Göl
Curated by Jade Barget and Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
A program by C/LENS in cooperation with Sinema Transtopia
Curated by Tang Xuedan (Echo)
OV with English subs
Towards A Common Tenderness
Kaori Oda, Japan 2017, 63 min.
Thus A Noise Speaks
Kaori Oda, Japan 2010, 38 min.
For Kaori Oda, filmmaking is a medium to reflect upon the world around her, and the camera allows her to capture her observations. Towards A Common Tenderness and Thus A Noise Speaks contemplate what it means to be a filmmaker. The first is a meditation about the medium itself and the filmmaker’s sense of alienation while wandering in Bosnia Herzegovina, while the latter is a courageous intervention in her family relations that takes the audience into the mind of a queer filmmaker who is, first and foremost, a human.
OV with English subs
Followed by a talk with Aileen Ye and Viv Li
A Real Girl
Praewa Bulthaweenan, UK 2019, 8 min.
I Didn’t Dare to Speak
Aileen Ye, Netherlands 2021, 7 min.
That Day of the Month
Jirassaya Wongsutin, Thailand 2014, 28 min.
Daughter
Ahn Lee, USA 2017, 5 min.
She Dyes Her Hair Pink
Viv Li, Portugal/China 2020, 8 min.
The Way We Are
Amanda Ann-Min Wong, Canada 2020, 15 min.
Thunder Treasures
Praewa Bulthaweenan, UK 2020, 7 min.
There is a common desire for many queer people to re-live an alternate adolescence – that formative period that shapes who we become – without the fear and trauma which our realities often bring. This programme offers a vision of growth and transformation, as well as bringing to light the personal conflicts and vulnerability of queer youth by piecing together fragments of realities, fantasies, and reflections.
Aileen Ye is an Irish-Chinese filmmaker and activist. In 2020, after graduating with an MSc in Sociology with a critical focus on decolonising the aesthetics of moving-images, she began her self-taught filmmaking practice. Her style incorporates experimental and cinéma vérité techniques to develop a critical gaze on the social and political environments which shape the human condition.
Viv Li is a Chinese filmmaker, writer and comedian. She is a previous fellow of Berlinale Talents and the Nipkow Program, an IDFAcademy Alumna and the recipient of an Erasmus Mundus Scholarship. Viv holds a masters in Documentary Directing from DocNomads and a bachelors in Drama and Films from the University of Manchester.
Director Kamila Andini Indonesia/Singapore/France/Australia 2021
95 Min., OV with English subs
In a society where young women are expected to marry on the cusp of adulthood, Yuni follows the young, bright and ambitious titular character and her journey towards coming of age and her negotiations with the possible life paths that await her. Filmmaker Kamila Andini delicately illustrates the tenderness and vulnerability of adolescence and the desire for Yuni to have agency and build a life of her own.
OV with English subs
Followed by Total Body Workout with Kexin Hao
Memory Palace
Dorothy Cheung, Hong Kong 2020, 23 min. (4 segments)
More Happiness
Livia Huang, USA 2021, 13 min.
A Cure for All Things
Katherine Chou, USA 2020, 7 min.
Reality Fragment 160921
七个木 Qigemu 七個木 (April Lin/Jasmine Lin), UK 2018, 14 min.
The Timeless Morphs: 3 Body Sessions
Kexin Hao, Netherlands 2022, 23 min.
The programme Memory Palace, named after the moving image project by Hong Kong filmmaker Dorothy Cheung, weaves together different memories of diasporic individuals with complimentary short films. It presents histories and tools of remembrance from across multiple generations, ranging from objects to familial stories and the body. The screening is followed by Total Body Workout, an experience in which history does not unfold in chronological order but as a head-to-toe sequence.
Total Body Workout
with Kexin Hao
Total Body Workoutleads you through a ‘total body’ experience in which history does not unfold in chronological order but as a head-to-toe sequence. How is the body scripted and shaped by the in which times it lives? How are national agendas and political ideologies woven into bodily semiotics? How does one’s body memory become an integral part of hegemonic historical narratives? And how do we inhabit a historical and totalised body? Based on nationwide physical exercise routines and mass gymnastic performances taking place in Asia, the Eastern Bloc and the United States, Total Body Workout proposes a recomposition of existing corporal movements and a reconfiguration of the past in the present. Here and now, we work out the total body.
Kexin Hao is a visual artist and designer born in Beijing and based in Rotterdam. Her practice is a marriage of graphic design and performance/publicly engaging art. In her recent works, Kexin investigates the themes of body, rituals, health, and collective memory.
