Saturday, 9th February 2019 – 8pm

MAMAN, MAMAN, MAMAN

D: Lucia Margarita Bauer, DP: Lucia Margarita Bauer, Nora Lawrenz, DE 2019, 37 min., French/German OV w/ English subs – GP

Family isn’t chosen, family is given. Maman, Maman, Maman transforms this essential condition of life by breaking with the one master narrative and compiling a family album of contradictory hierarchies. Stories intertwine generations, places, documents, smells and objects. And therein we wander: we taste chocolate mousse with whiskey, feel safe while surrounded by flowered wallpaper, observe moths in the corners of dusty rooms and singers in the garden. The ancestral home preserves everything, because the house holds it all together, gives shelter, invites, becomes a stage and a symbol. As if directing a choir, the filmmaker mixes up her family’s rituals and peculiarities until everything is rendered visible: new ways of life, dependencies, death and emancipation.

THE GREAT PRETENDER

D: Nathan Silver, Cast: Esther Garrel, Keith Poulson, Maëlle Poésy, Linas Phillips, DP: Sean Price Williams, US 2018, 71 min., English OV – GP

When it comes to love, would you rather lie or make stuff up? Reveal or invent yourself? Nathan Silver steeps his romantic roundelay in soft focus, zooming in on faces in search of true feelings and exposing fake ones. Two French women fall for New York men, but the power dynamics are shaky from the get-go. The theatre director Mona stages her own life in order to savour the pain of her lost love, and soon enough all her protagonists are sleeping together in turn. Silver’s close-ups dissect these spoiled brats who at times make each other’s lives more beautiful, and at others more difficult. The Great Pretender is a comedic cry for help and an ode to bewitching reality through a shift in perspective.

After the screening

Debate: INVENTION WITH BENEFITS

Floating over things, changing perspectives, crafting an essay out of one’s own family: how much privilege is found in inventive storytelling, and how much invention in privilege? Regarding knowledge as power, the craft of lying and self-reflexive storytelling.

Guests: Sara Fattahi (Filmmaker and producer, “Coma”,”Chaos”) and Britta Thie (Artist, “Translantics”, “The Superhosts”) // in the presence of the directors Lucia Margarita Bauer and Nathan Silver

Moderated by Elena Meilicke (Film critic)

Re-Run: Friday, 15th February – 5.30 pm

Tickets