Films

• Taxi Sister / Siostry Taxi, 30'
  Theresa Traore Dahlberg, SEN 2011, 30’

  Five years ago the Senegalese government offered ten women the chance to obtain a driving licence and buy a car on credit. Today, of the 15,000 taxi drivers in Dakar 15 are women. The film shows one of them, Boury, in a disagreement started by a man confronting her with medieval arguments, and through the rest of the day – to her dream: her own taxi company, employing men and women. The company will be named Malaou, after the horse of a Senegalese hero. Boury’s father died three years ago in a car accident, so she believes she became one of the Taxi Sisters for him and to take over his role within the family.

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  Authors:

  • Theresa Traore Dahlberg
• Grandfather Never Saw the Sea / Dziadek nigdy nie widział morza, 27'
  Christine Hürzeler, GER, SUI 2011, 27’

  The film title’s claim, grandfather’s assumed deficiency, proves on inspection of his family archive of Super 8 and other film material as a bottomless pit for our curiosity and speculation. The wistful, melancholy collage succeeds in creating a mental mirror of epoch, idyll and trauma. Thus the individual unease becomes a shared unease, and the image of the family becomes the emotional sound of a thunderstorm. Memories are the only paradise from which we cannot be driven. But at the same time they are the only hell we are damned to, even if we are innocent.

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  Authors:

  • Christine Hürzeler
• Strobogramm, 3'
  Flora Watzal, AUT 2011, 3’

  In Flora Watzal’s rastered image surface the simple switching on and off of a ceiling light leads as if by stroboscopic deceleration and dissection to an effect that cannot fail to provoke merriment. And the click of the switch leads by super-imposition through an acoustic web to a rhythmic rattling sound.

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  Authors:

  • Flora Watzal
• Viva Paradis, 17'
  Isabelle Tollenaere, BEL 2011, 17’

  Carthage, a suburb of Tunis, in March 2011, in the centre of the Arab Spring battlefield: a luxury hotel. Empty beach, empty pool, empty lobby. Everywhere deserted. Just two or three older tourists stayed on during the fighting. Or came back afterwards. Looking at them you wouldn’t guess. They are lying in the sun. As usual. Table tennis. Bar. Nightclub. The dancers come on stage in uniform, and outside a revolutionary graffito says thanks to Facebook. Sunshine, health and fitness, entertainment, internet, revolution, entertainment, health and fitness, sunshine.

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  Authors:

  • Isabelle Tollenaere
• I‘m not dead, only asleep / Żyję, tylko śpię, 25'
  Juan Sebastian Lopez Maas, NED 2011, 25’

  An ass was the only animal upon which Jesus rode. It is a holy animal. Here a donkey wanders as if through a biblical landscape. Vultures circle overhead. The animal dies alone. Its lower jaw be comes a musical instrument. The Afro-Peruvian tap dancer and Cajun musician Amador Ballumbrosio, who died in 2009, knew that, like everyone here, he would return as a donkey. At his funeral, instead of weeping and mourning, the people danced and made music as he did. On donkey teeth.

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  Authors:

  • Juan Sebastian Lopez Maas
• Abuelas / Babcie, 9'

  The grandmother’s apartment is a reconstruction. Things from a previous life bought from flea-markets in Buenos Aires. Photos of people who have vanished are imagined. Previous conversations with other grandmothers about the years between 1976 and 1983 are condensed to a poetic level. Everything is animated, but true. Only thus does the unthinkable become portrayable: 30,000 children, women and men disappeared during the dictatorship of General Videla and were never seen again. The babies born in internment camps were handed over to families in the service of the military and terror. To this day their grandmothers are still searching for them.

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  Authors:

  • Afarin Eghbal