All guests at the 10th Berlin Critics’ Week
The artist Mathilde ter Heijne and the filmmaker and author Srikanth Srinivasan will examine experimental fictions of the past. The art historian T. J. Demos will interview filmmakers from the Elemental Bodies programme about their artistic practice in the climate crisis. The director Khaled Abdulwahed will discuss documentary filmmaking with film critic Tomás Guarnaccia. The cabaret artist İdil Baydar and Margarita Tsomou, co-founder of Missy magazine, will explore what anger has to do with humor. Current-day political films about Russia and China will be discussed by the cultural scientist and director Jinyan Zeng as well as the journalist, curator, and documentarian Anna Narinskaya, while the historian Massimo Perinelli and the curator and journalist Şirin Fulya Erensoy will tackle questions about capitalism and activism. The actress Susanne Sachsse and the film curator Davide Oberto will talk about class and social flashpoints in Buenos Aires. And, last but not least, the filmmaker Gala Hernández López and the filmmaker/editor Eytan Ipeker will set off in search of feminist perspectives on historiographies.
Phantom Thread
TH FEB 15
On the first evening of this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week, an experimental feature film and a playful cinematic experiment will provide the common thread for a discussion about unconventional styles, image textures, and the art of captivating an audience. With his second full-length film An Evening Song (For Three Voices), Graham Swon has proven himself a specialist in the use of audacious film methods and a master of making references across multiple different eras and styles. In the debate with the title Phantom Thread, he meets the artist Mathilde ter Heijne, an expert in a wide range of analogue and digital processes of art production, with whom she creates sculptures and performances as well as installations and video works. Her work echoes questions of spirituality and identity, which are also central to Swon’s film. Another guest is film critic and author Srikanth Srinivasan. He is a member of the Critics’ Week selection committee and has already published two books on Amit Dutta – one of India’s most important experimental filmmakers, whose film Mother, Who Will Weave Now? will open the evening.
Moderation: Lucía Salas
Elemental Bodies: Ecologies, Media, Extraction
FR FEB 16
This year, the art historian and cultural critic T. J. Demos will present a specially curated film programme at Berlin Critics’ Week. In the following discussion, Demos will ask how artists today are reacting to capitalist and racist exploitation, to technological utopias and AI dystopias, and to the splintering of the climate movement. The discussion will be focused above all on what kinds of alternatives art can imagine and what modes of representation and living artists make use of – and especially how art might adopt a political stance. His discussion guests will include the filmmaker and critic Kevin B. Lee, the artist Angela Melitopoulos, and the designer, artist, and author Daniel Felstead. Their works will be shown in the evening’s film programme.
Moderation: T. J. Demos
Imitation of Life
SA FEB 17
Our film programme Imitation of Life promises a debate about films that feel like reality, only better. The evening’s directors – Shambhavi Kaul, Éléonore Saintagnan, and Natalia del Mar Kašik – will be joined by two guests as they philosophize about the way their films play with mythology, experiment, and everyday life, not to mention giant fish, langurs, and imitations of horses. The filmmaker Khaled Abdulwahed (Purple Sea), well known for his incisive political films, recently cast himself as the narrator in his essay film Background – a move both similar and different to that of Éléonore Saintagnan, who plays the protagonist in her film Camping du lac. For the debate, we have also invited a young and already prominent voice in Argentinian film criticism – Tomás Guarnaccia (f.e. Con los ojos abiertos), who is participating in this year’s Berlinale Talent Press – to respond to the evening’s programme, in fine Berlin Critics’ Week tradition, without any bias or preconception.
Moderation: Charlie Bendisch
Sound and Fury
SU FEB 18
Dicks: The Musical is the A24-produced film adaptation of the musical Fucking Identical Twins, the authors and lead actors of which – Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp – we invited to Berlin for a debate about humor, satire, and politics. In their film, Jackson and Sharp appear in straight drag and lampoon male entrepreneur types; Chloé Galibert-Laîné, in her video essay I Would Like to Rage, pokes fun at herself while calling for a social commitment to female anger. After the film programme, the trio will discuss self-irony, nonsense, and the ethical, political, moral expectations of gags – plus the question of what actually makes jokes topical – in a conversation with the cabaret artist İdil Baydar, who for over a decade has been using her characters Gerda Grischke and Jilet Ayşe to dissect Germany’s racist clichés, and with Margarita Tsomou, the co-founder and co-editor of Missy: a magazine for pop, politics, and feminism with “an attitude that constantly challenges the status quo, with a smile”.
Moderation: Dennis Vetter
Hangover
MO FEB 19
Under the title Hangover, two films will explore the deep traces that political violence and dictatorship can leave behind in the consciousness of artists, and in their art – as well as in the general population. In her short film Dreams About Putin the DocNomads alumna Nastia Korkia interprets dreams about Vladimir Putin that Russian citizens have recorded on social media since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. The literary scholar, art historian, and artist Zhenming Guo is traveling to Berlin for a discussion of his feature film debut Tedious Days and Nights. This film portrays a group of Chinese poets who rebel against the present and past of party dictatorship through their art. In a conversation moderated by Andrea Kuhn – Festival Director of the Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival – the directors will be joined by the Chinese activist, cultural scientist, and filmmaker Jinyan Zeng, who currently teaches about feminist and independent Chinese documentary film in Sweden, and by Anna Narinskaya. A Russian journalist, filmmaker, activist and curator, Narinskaya recently put on a play and an exhibition in Berlin about political prisoners in Russia and the oppression of the LGBTQ+ community there.
Moderation: Andrea Kuhn
Carnival of Souls
TU FEB 20
The renowned video artist and filmmaker Omer Fast frequently approaches the invisible and the taboos in his work. He uses his characters to address real power structures and mechanisms of exclusion in societies; his symbolically-charged works also probe the fragility of identity, space, and ultimately reality. His new feature film Abendland will be juxtaposed with the short film Notes from Gog Magog by Riar Rizaldi, a director who regularly plays with the boundaries of the documentary: Rinaldi’s work draws unexpected connections between capitalism, technology, exploitation, and ecology, leading – in the case of his new film – to a genuine horror trip. What role is played by bodies, identities, biographies, and experiences of violence in these films will be revealed by Massimo Perinelli, who has worked extensively on film in his capacity as an historian and is now a consultant on migration at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. The curator and journalist Şirin Fulya Erensoy will also join the discussion as an expert on video activism and genre films, ultimately offering an aesthetic and political appraisal of the evening’s films.
Moderation: Dennis Vetter
City Lights
WE FEB 21
In the programme City Lights, Francisco Bouzas tells the story of a group of queer rebels in search of the gateway to the afterlife in his playful feature film debut Hidden City. His film will be shown together with Warnes, an experimental documentary by Narcisa Hirsch from 1991, thus placing the film in relation to a master of Argentinian experimental cinema. Davide Oberto, who worked for many years at the Turin Film Festival, curated numerous retrospectives and was co-director of the Doclisboa festival together with Cíntia Gil, will report on documentary films, archive programmes, and the perspective of European festivals on Latin American cinema as part of the debate. Together with the actress and director Susanne Sachsse, who is known in the film industry not least for her collaboration with Bruce LaBruce, they will discuss the DIY aesthetic and queerness of the film Hidden City as well as the joy of artistic experimentation.
Moderation: Lucía Salas
Hard, Fast, and Beautiful
TH FEB 22
To conclude Berlin Critics’ Week for this year, we will be facing up to the past – and, of course, to the future as well. We will debate the (newly rekindled) film-historical obsession with the Western genre as well as feminist, postcolonial, and digital attacks on the status quo of history writing. Gala Hernández López – who will be showing her new speculative work for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world at Forum Expanded – observes people and the world in her essay films through a technical lens, asking what influence virtual alter egos and new forms of communication are having on consciousness and gender roles today. The editor and experimental filmmaker Eytan Ipeker (Burning Days) will be on hand to help describe what happens when, on this particular evening, three films meet that have as many similarities as differences. The two directors in attendance, Clara Winter and Catarina Vasconcelos, will naturally be asked which adjective best describes their respective films: hard, fast, or beautiful?
Moderation: Amos Borchert
Cooperation with the Festival Basecamp of the Locarno Film Festival
Reimagining Film Conversations / Launch of Fever Dream Journal
FR FEB 16
Alongside our regular debates, we are delighted to present both an additional discussion and the launch of the magazine Fever Dream Journal, which came into being as a follow-up to A Long Night of Dreaming about the Future of Intelligence – an experimental series of talks that took place within the 2023 Locarno Film Festival.
Rafael Dernbach, who has been developing discussion formats for Locarno since 2022, will be visiting Berlin Critics’ Week with a panel on the topic of discussion spaces. Together with three guests, Dernbach will be talking about market logic and mechanisms of exclusion as well as festival routines, film festivals as a space for critical exchange, counter-strategies like the targeted inclusion of underrepresented voices, and development of new approaches to discussion. The panel will include Dana Linssen (Critics’ Choice, International Film Festival Rotterdam), Denise Bucher (President of the Swiss Association of Film Journalists), and Jens Geiger-Kiran (Cinephiler Salon des Hauptverbands für Cinephilie, Cinemalovers). After the talk, Alexander Scholz (HOLO magazine) and Jan Schmidt Bist (Running Water) will introduce the Fever Dream Journal.
Read the announcement at wochederkritik.de
All guests at Berlin Critics’ Week 2024
Ticket sale for the opening conference
Ticket sale for the Critics’ Week
Timetable of the Critics’ Week 2024
Announcement for the opening conference
Press contact: Elisabeth Mohr, presse@wochederkritik.de
Photo: ABENDLAND by Omer Fast, ©filmgalerie451
Berlin Critics’ Week is an event organized by the German Film Critics Association and funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, the Stiftung Kulturwerk of the VG Bild-Kunst, and the Rudolf Augstein Foundation. The opening conference will be held in cooperation with the Film and Media Art section of the Akademie der Künste.