Unsigned
Unsigned
Unsigned
Tue, 18th of February 2025 – 7 p.m. Hackesche Höfe Kino
Films:
ALL QUIET AT SUNRISE
I WANT TO BE A HOUSE
Debate Format: REAKTIONSZEIT
Patience is key: a discussion between our guests about the evening’s film program, in which the filmmakers present are initially allowed only to listen. Later, they will have the opportunity to respond.
Guests include: Narges Kalhor, Julian Warner, Oskar Weimar, Zhu Xin
ALL QUIET AT SUNRISE
D: Zhu Xin, C: Wang Ke, Chen Yan, Wang Yinjie, DOP: Zhang Wei, CHN 2025, 101 Min., Chinese Original with English Subtitles – World Premiere
Linguist Ma Ke is doing his doctorate on Lucy, a 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of a pre-human found in Ethiopia in 1974. His bold thesis: Lucy, and all of her kind, had already developed the ability to speak. As in his poetically meandering VANISHING DAYS, director Zhu Xin takes a realistic starting point and ends up in places that feel almost magical: in the mysterious house that Ma Ke’s mother bought without his knowledge, for instance, and the eerie forest where his professor Li Tong’s daughter disappeared. Reality, dream and fable merge as Ma Ke begins to lose himself between his obsession with Lucy and his all-too-human relationships. ALL QUIET AT SUNRISE reflects on the nature and origin of language, while developing its very own.
Zhu Xin, born in June 1996, graduated from China Academy of Art in 2018. His debut feature, VANISHING DAYS (2018), was selected for the Berlinale Forum and the Busan International Film Festival’s New Currents section. It was also screened at more than 30 international film festivals, including Hong Kong, Taipei, Marrakech, Sofia and Vienna. OLYMPIC (2022), a sci-fi sports thriller, premiered at the Warsaw International Film Festival in the Shorts Competition. His documentary feature A SONG RIVER premiered at the 8th Pingyao International Film Festival and won both the Youth Jury Award and the Cinephilia Critics’ Award. ALL QUIET AT SUNRISE is his second fiction feature.
[Tickets]
I WANT TO BE A HOUSE
(NATAKA KUA NYUMBA)
D: Oskar Weimar, C: Rose Nganga, Ane Kariri, Vincent Tonui, KEN 2025, 31 Min., Swahili Original with English Subtitles – World Premiere
After years of labouring in a colonial farmhouse, a housekeeper in Nairobi tells her co-worker that she wishes to abandon her body and simply become the house. Her goal, in a sense, is: to disappear. Filmmaker Oskar Weimar accompanies her patiently, in calm shots that are first reminiscent of still lifes, then of observational cinema – while he himself ghosts through the shots as a white homeowner. Weimar and his collaborators infuse this woman’s mysterious act of defiance with a deep emotional life, portraying a group, a present, a moment in history through the act of an individual. Here, an unsentimental turning away from the world makes for a light-footed turn towards cinema. A film that sits somewhere between meditation, transformation and dance formation.
Oskar Weimar:
With a background in sociology, Oskar Weimar has created both documentary and narrative films that delve into concepts of identity and the ways individuals relate to society. In 2022, he earned a Master’s in Film and Television from the Victorian College of the Arts, where he developed an iterative, hands-on filmmaking approach. This method involved collaborating with non-professional actors through a process of improvisation, reflection, and continuous reworking. His debut feature film, NYAMULA, was filmed and produced in Kenya, in collaboration with local filmmakers and non-professional actors, and premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2025. Alongside James Litchfield, Oskar Weimar is a co-founder of the Melbourne-based collective, ‘What Films’.
[Tickets]