Films

• Machine Man / Człowiek-maszyna14'

  ESP 2011, 14’

  Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh and also the industrial centre of the country. Day after day millions of people are engaged in the hardest forms of physical labour – to keep the city and the globalised economy running. The film gives us an insight into the daily lives of a number of men and women: a labourer who together with his colleagues produces 18,000 hand-made bricks every day, says that he sometimes feels like a machine. A woman works twelve hours a day with her baby on her back. A porter believes that people are more efficient than machines – if someone who only weighs 50 kilos can carry a 120-kilogram load.

   

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  Authors:

  • Roser Corella
  • Alfonso Moral
• A story for the Modlins / Opowieść dla Modlinów26'

  ESP 2012, 26’

  A small role in Roman Polanski’s film “Rosemary’s Baby” was to be the high point of Elmer Modlin’s acting career. After that he leaves the USA with his wife Margaret and their son Nelson. They spend the next 30 years far away, living a quiet life in a spacious apartment. Margaret devotes herself entirely to her art. Elmer believes in her. And Nelson has to pose for the huge symbolic paintings. – Sergio Oksman reconstructs their truly gruesome fate on the basis of photos and video material that was found in a box in the street after the Modlins’ death. In doing so he achieves an interesting balancing act between fiction and reality.

   

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  Authors:

  • Sergio Oksman
• Schurback29'

  GER 2012, 29’

  His personal life could have taken a different course, says Schurback, who followed in the footsteps of his father as a retail salesman. For thirty years he sold umbrellas. Maybe he was too often too “contrapuntual”, as he says. The lone-wolf tradesman sometimes advised the customers against purchase. With considerable eloquence and dotting his story with anecdotes, Schurback tells how he became unemployed, and philosophises about the digitalised and globalised world. At the Job Center the senior citizen undergoes coaching for a menial 1-Euro job. The film finds sober and often sad images to match Schurback’s narrative, showing him in his new warehouse job or in the empty umbrella shop, where he sometimes rides his bicycle in circles. A vicarious tale.

   

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  Authors:

  • Arne Körner
• An Archipelago / Archipelag11'

  FRA 2011, 11’

  On 22 October 2010 HMS Astute, the Royal Navy’s largest and most modern nuclear-powered submarine ran aground off the Scottish Isle of Skye. Shortly beforehand, the commander had proudly told the BBC about the fully-electronic navigation system.– In badly-lit, wobbly and grainy takes and with brief intertitles, the film recounts the events of two years ago, feeling its way into the depths of the human psyche. To this day the former commander has not spoken about the incident.

   

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  Authors:

  • Clément Cogitore
• Artifacts of the City / Artefakty miasta20'

  GER 2012, 20’

  The young no-budget filmmaker Florian Schneider follows the skateboarding legend Bobby Puleo around New York City. Sometimes he wishes he weren’t a skateboarder, Puleo says. Or he should get paid for it. “Just to do me.” Instead he works at a diner. Because his art – collages of notes and photographs he finds in the streets and collects in his chaotic apartment – doesn’t provide a living either. Schneider’s brief study is a very intimate portrait of the skateboarding fanatic.

   

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  Authors:

  • Florian Schneider
• Kreis Wr. Neustadt / Okręg Wr. Neustadt5'

  AUT 2011, 5’

  Almost 100 Lower Austrian traffic islands in five minutes, circled on a Vespa, its engine howling at the architectural dreariness of their surroundings. In roundabouts there is no escaping the sometimes futuristic panorama. At the start of the film the circle already closes. Silently and as if floating, the camera begins its orbit by circling an underground traffic island. 2011: A Circular Odyssey.

   

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  Authors:

  • Johann Lurf