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Guests 2019

Conference 2019: Intensive Care Cinema

Bibiana Beglau

Film and theatre actress, working with directors who shape contemporary theatre and film, including Aelrun Goette, Christoph Schlingensief, Dimiter Gotscheff, Einar Schleef, Frank Castorf, Luk Perceval Jan Bonny and Martin Kušej. She achieved international recognition with her leading role in Volker Schlöndorff’s feature “The Legend of Rita”. Beglau played in many great film and television productions such as “Über Barbarossa Platz”, “Unter dem Eis” or “Was Du nicht siehst”. Her acting manifests an idiosyncratic, intelligent and prominent physicality. She is a member of the ensemble of the Residenztheater in Munich.

Bibiana Beglau
Susanne Bredehöft

Susanne Bredehöft

Film, theatre and television actress. In 1988, Bredehöft had her first role in a film by Christoph Schlingensief (“Mother’s Mask”). She then appeared in several more of his productions, including “The German Chainsaw Massacre”, “Terror 2000 – Intensive Care Unit Germany” and “Freakstars 3000”. From 2003 to 2013, Bredehöft was a member of the Schauspiel Bonn and played in the movies “Fikkefuchs” (Jan Henrik Stahlberg) and “Der lange Sommer der Theorie” (Irene von Alberti). Bredehöft can currently be seen in the film “Adam and Evelyn” by Andreas Goldstein.

Amelie Deuflhard

Amelie Deuflhard has been artistic director of Kampnagel, the international production house for performing arts in Hamburg, since 2007. In the mid-1990s, Deuflhard began working as a production manager for independent theatre, dance and music projects in Berlin, where she directed the Sophiensæle (2000-2007), as well as the interim-use project “Volkspalast” at the Palast der Republik (2004). Deuflhard co-produced Christoph Schlingensief’s last work, “Via Intolleranza II” (2010). When the Theater Kampnagel offered shelter to refugees in 2015, the artistic director was sued by the AfD.

Amelie Deuflhard
Anton Gernot

Anton Gernot

is part of Peng! (also: Peng Collective), a group of artists, activists, craftsmen and scientists from Berlin. As “masters of civil disobedience”, the Berlin activist collective draws attention to social grievances with satirical actions and advertising campaigns. Together with Peng!, Gernot already started a weapon recall in the USA in the name of “Heckler und Koch”, hacked the German Bundesbank and infiltrated the CDU. In 2018 he was awarded the Aachen Peace Prize together with Peng!.

Susanne Heinrich

Film director, writer and singer. Her fourth novel, “American Feelings”, was published in 2011 and she has been studying film direction at the DFFB since 2012. Heinrich said that with her debut, “Aren’t You Happy?”, she wanted to “make productive use of the anxiety in society”. The episodic film explores the meanings of motherhood, neo-spirituality and depression in a radically alienated postmodern society and plays on a visual-aesthetic level with the so-called “male gaze” and with the question of whether another gaze can even exist.

Susanne Heinrich
Udo Kier

Udo Kier

Actor. An early starring role in Andy Warhol’s “Frankenstein” led to a string of arthouse and mainstream horror films. He has become notorious for his work with cult directors, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Walerian Borowczyk, Gus Van Sant, Christoph Schlingensief, Dario Argento and Lars von Trier, who is currently working on a film entitled “Dimension” which spans 30 years. Every year the cast and crew – including Udo – meet to shoot footage. His most famous Hollywood roles include his appearance as Ron Camp in “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”, Curly in “Barb Wire” and as a NASA flight psychologist in “Armageddon”.

Andrew Kötting

Artist, film-maker and Professor of Time Based Media at the University for the Creative Arts. In addition to numerous experimental films, performances and installations, he became famous in 1996 for his first feature film “Gavillant”. His oeuvre varies in its’ outcomes, moving from live-art inflected, often absurdist pieces, through to documentaries, LPs, CDs, collages, paintings, drawings and books. He collaborates with friends and family on projects which have included his grand-parents, his dead dad and in particular his muse and disabled daughter, Eden Kötting.

Andrew Kötting
Milo Rau (© beaborgers)

Milo Rau

Author and theatre and film director. He became known for re-enactments (“Die letzten Tage der Ceausescus”, “Hate Radio”) and (re-)staged show trials (“Moskauer Prozesse”). He made “The Congo Tribunal”, an examination of the role of international actors in the war in Eastern Congo, both as a play in Berlin and Bukavu, and as a documentary for the cinema. His works often situate themselves at the border between activism and art, creating a tension between staging and documentary material. Starting in the 2018/19 season, he has been Artistic Director of the National Theatre Gent.

Monika Rinck

Monika Rinck writes lyrical, epic and essayistic texts, silly jokes and critical poetologies, about motor force and composite creatures. Rinck also works as a translator and nurtures a predilection for curious word formations, which she collects in her online glossary “Begriffsstudio”. In 2004, she published her first volume of poetry, “Verzückte Distanzen”. In 2015, her essay “Risiko und Idiotie” was published; an inventory of the significance of poetry in today’s society.

Monika Rinck
Philip Ursprung

Philip Ursprung

Phillip Ursprung is an art historian. Since 2011, he has been Professor of History of Art and Architecture at ETH Zurich. He has also taught in Berlin, Geneva, New York and Barcelona. He has published numerous books, including “Die Kunst der Gegenwart: 1960 bis heute” and “Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art” In his books, he dissolves the boundaries of art historiography and repeatedly draws interdisciplinary references in order to provoke new ways of reading. He describes his method of using connecting pieces to mediate the past as analogous to Tarkovsky’s approach with the character of the Stalker in the eponymous film.

Resisting Disappearance

Puangsoi Aksornsawang

Filmmaker and visual artist. She studied under Udo A. Engel and Angela Schanelec at the Hamburger Kunsthochschule (HFBK). In her graduation film “Nakorn-Sawan”, which is part documentary and was shot by the director in her home village in Thailand, she deals with the meaning of absence, starting from the death of her mother. In earlier works, which spanned performance, video essays and photography, Aksornsawang also dealt with questions of identity, memory and personal relationships, often starting from her own absence in Thailand.

Puangsoi Aksornsawang
Gürcan Keltek

Gürcan Keltek

Filmmaker, producer and cameraman. Studied film at Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir, Turkey. In 2012, he made the short film “Fazlamesai”, which he followed up with the short film “The Burning Mountain” in 2014. In “Colony” (2015), on the island of Cyprus, Keltek dealt with trauma, memory, geography and psychology. Keltek’s politicised film work made it impossible for him to screen his film “Meteors” in Turkey, even though it turned him into one of the most prominent voices in recent Turkish cinema. Keltek’s starting point is mostly documentary, his form experimental – as in his latest film, “Gulyabani”.

Carla Simón

Catalan director and screenwriter. She studied audiovisual communication in Barcelona. During her master’s degree at the London Film School, she produced several short films, including the documentary “Born Positive”, about young people born HIV positive. She shot both her graduation film, “Las Pequeñas Cosas”, and her debut feature, “Estiu 1993” (Summer 1993), in rural Catalonia. In the latter, which is based on her own biography, she portrays the experiences of a child shortly after the death of her parents and her return to a family context.

Carla Simón (© José Aymá)
Philip Ursprung

Philip Ursprung

Phillip Ursprung is an art historian. Since 2011, he has been Professor of History of Art and Architecture at ETH Zurich. He has also taught in Berlin, Geneva, New York and Barcelona. He has published numerous books, including “Die Kunst der Gegenwart: 1960 bis heute” and “Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art” In his books, he dissolves the boundaries of art historiography and repeatedly draws interdisciplinary references in order to provoke new ways of reading. He describes his method of using connecting pieces to mediate the past as analogous to Tarkovsky’s approach with the character of the Stalker in the eponymous film.

Dark Matter

Roger Koza

Roger Koza works as a critic for the journal La voz del interior published in Córdoba, Argentina. His texts are also regularly featured in the magazines and Quid, as well as on his website Con los ojos abiertos. He hosts the weekly TV show El cinematógrafo, broadcasted by Canal 10 in Córdoba, and he is the guest columnist for Filmoteca, broadcasted by Televisión Pública. Also, he works as a programmer for the Hamburg International Film Festival and Viennale; he is the artistic director of the Cosquín International Film Festival as well as DOC Buenos Aires.

Roger Koza
Kitso Lynn Lelliot

Kitso Lynn Lelliott

Artist and filmmaker. Studied film and television at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa where she recently received her PhD. Lelliott’s theoretical work focuses on decolonial narratives, epistemological violence, and the recouping of eradicated knowledge systems. In her numerous installations, video works, and films, Lelliott explores the presence and absence of the ghostly, of ancestors, and his(her)tory. Together with the Asiko Art School programme she presented a group piece at the Dak’Art Biennale 2014, the Bamako Encounters 2015 and the Casablanca Biennale 2016.

Invention with Benefits

Lucia Margarita Bauer

Photographer, media designer, curator and film director. Without a valid high school diploma, she attended art school in Strasbourg for a year and later continued her studies at the Berlin University of thntal Media Design in the class led by Thomas Arslan. Bauer curated numerous exhibitions in Berlin, including at the former HBC and currently at the Santa Lucia Gallery of Talks. As a photographer for daily newspapers and magazines, she has photographed musicians, artists and philosophers such as Jean-Michel Jarre, Albert Oehlen and Claude Lanzmann.

Lucia Margarita Bauer
Sara Fattahi (©Nadja Wehling)

Sara Fattahi

Filmmaker, producer. First worked as a storyboard and animation artist for various broadcasting channels, like Al Jazeera Kids and SpaceToon. In 2010, she turned to independent filmmaking. In her first feature-length documentary, “Coma” (Berlin Critics’ Week 2016), Fattahi films her mother and grandmother in Damascus, while they are besieged by the civil war. The film won several awards, including the “Regard Neuf Award” for best debut feature. Her most recent film, “Chaos” (2018), premiered at Locarno and tells the story of three women in three different cities in Syria, Austria and Sweden.

Nathan Silver

Director and scriptwriter of numerous short and feature films, including absurd comedies like “Stinking Heaven” and the hallucinatory psycho-love film “Thirst Street”. The independent New York filmmaker has experience both with improvisation and with precisely scripted dialogue, and he works with professional as well as non-professional actors. In 2016, together with Mike Ott (“California Dreams”, Berlin Critics’ Week 2017), Silver made the film “Actor Martinez”, about a performer who hires two indie filmmakers (Silver and Ott) to make a film with him as the leading actor.

Nathan Silver

Empathy for Vanity

Horst Bredekamp

Art historian. After studying in Kiel, Munich, Berlin and Marburg, he received his doctorate in art history in 1974. He has been a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin since 1993. From 2013 to 2018, he was one of the speakers of the Cluster of Excellence “Bild Wissen Gestaltung”. From 2015 to 2018, he was active as one of the founding directors of the Humboldt Forum, Berlin. He has written almost 30 books and more than 600 scientific essays. He has been appointed to four scientific academies, including the American Academy for Arts and Sciences (2016) and the Pour Le Mérite for Sciences and Arts (2014).

Horst Bredekamp (© juergen-bauer.com)
Aaron Schimberg

Aaron Schimberg

Director and screenwriter from New York. His first feature, “Go Down Death”, which is based on the folktales of Jonathan Mallory Sinus, satirizes the fatalistic inhabitants of an abandoned city. With his second feature, “Chained for Life”, which he describes as a response to Tod Browning’s 1932 film “Freaks”, he questions traditional cinematic concepts of representation.

Albert Serra

Director, scriptwriter and producer. He achieved fame through his films, “Honor de cavalleria”, “Història de la meva mort ” and “La mort de Louis XIV”. Serra also presented the 101-hour film “Three Little Pigs” at the 13th documenta and staged the play “Liberté” at the Volksbühne. In 2015, Albert Serras’ project “Singularity”, was selected to represent Catalonia in the 56th Venice Biennale. His new film, “Roi Soleil”, brings together performance art and cinematic form, once again focusing on the end of the Sun King’s life.

Albert Serra (© Oscar Orengo)

Delight & Delusion

Devika Girish

Film critic, based in Los Angeles. She has written for publications such as Film Comment, Village Voice, Reverse Shot, MUBI’s Notebook, Kinoscope, and Vague Visages, and also edits the online arts-and-culture magazine Ampersand. Devika grew up in central India and studied film and semiotics at Brown University. She is currently an Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she’s pursuing an M.A. in Specialized Arts Journalism. Devika is the recipient of a 2018 National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award and an invitee at this year’s Berlinale Talents.

Devika Girish
Susanne Kennedy (© Franziska Sinn)

Susanne Kennedy

Theatre director. Kennedy has frequently reinterpreted filmic material for the stage. At the Munich Kammerspiele, for example, she adapted Sydney Pollack’s dance drama, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t they?”,  in 2011, and staged “Warum läuft Herr R. Amok?”, based on the film by Michael Fengler and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in 2014. Kennedy often uses masks, playback dialogues, doubles and multimedia in her pieces – alienation devices that she employs to reflect on themes such as the relationship between bodies and technical objects. Her production “Coming Society” is currently at the Volksbühne.

Antonin Peretjatko

French filmmaker. Studied at the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière. In 2013, Peretjatko released his feature debut, “La Fille du 14 juillet”, a sunny love comedy set against the backdrop of a holiday drastically cut short by the government’s response to the economic crisis. The film screened in the “Quinzaine des Réalisateurs” in Cannes. With his second feature, the comedy “La Loi de la jungle” (2016), Peretjatko takes an ironic look at the modern world of work.

Antonin Peretjatko
Kostas Samaras

Kostas Samaras

Filmmaker and scriptwriter. After studying law in his native city Thessaloniki, Samaras moved to Paris to study film at the Sorbonne. Since then, Samaras has worked as a programmer for the Athens International Film Festival, as a film critic and has made several short films. His feature film debut, “Magic Skin”, is an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s novel of the same name. Samaras’ radically modern interpretation shows Greek society in an ecstatic, excessive state, wherein a writer has to make a pact with the devil in order to become an artist.

Implant

Lili Hinstin

Curator and festival director. She studied languages, literature and cultural studies with a focus on philosophy in Paris and Padua. In 2001, she founded the film production company “Les Films du Saut du Tigre”. From 2011 to 2013, she was deputy artistic director of the documentary film festival Cinéma du Réel and subsequently director of the international film festival Entrevues Belfort. She succeeded Carlo Chatrian in December 2018 as artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival.

Lili Hinstin
Ulrich Köhler (© Pandora Film, Photography: Annette Hauschild)

Ulrich Köhler

Director. He first studied art, then philosophy and later visual communication at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. After several short films, Köhler made his feature debut in 2002 with “Bungalow”, about a young man who deserts his military service. This was followed in 2006 by “Montag kommen die Fenster”, which tells the story of a woman who drops out. In 2011, Köhler won the Silver Bear for Best Director for his film “Sleeping Sickness”, which takes place in Cameroon and France. With “In My Room”, which screened in Cannes in 2018, he conceived a robinsonade in a deserted Germany.

Virgil Vernier

Since 2001, he has made films that mostly combine fiction, documentary and myth. Born and raised in Paris, Vernier is known for his critical observations of contemporary French urbanity, not least since his film “Mercuriales” (2014). Vernier shot his latest film, “Sophia Antipolis”, in the eponymous technology park in southern France. With the help of non-professional actors, he created beguiling, oppressive images of the present and recorded them on 16mm – images of strange beauty, at once poetic and apocalyptic.

Virgil Vernier (© Mezli Vega)

Staging Feminism

Susanne Heinrich

Film director, writer and singer. Her fourth novel, “American Feelings”, was published in 2011 and she has been studying film direction at the DFFB since 2012. Heinrich said that with her debut, “Aren’t You Happy?”, she wanted to “make productive use of the anxiety in society”. The episodic film explores the meanings of motherhood, neo-spirituality and depression in a radically alienated postmodern society and plays on a visual-aesthetic level with the so-called “male gaze” and with the question of whether another gaze can even exist.

Susanne Heinrich
Nina Power (© Guy Smallman)

Nina Power

Cultural and social theorist, translator and philosopher. She teaches philosophy at Roehampton University and writes for the Guardian and Jacobin magazine, among others. Her book “The One-Dimensional Woman” is considered one of the most important works of the current feminist discourse. In it, she discusses affirmative feminism that misses political and internationalist perspectives and instead integrates with consumerism. In her chapter, “Consumer Culture – Girls on Film,” she poses the question, “What does contemporary visual culture say about women?”

Jovana Reisinger

Her work frequently brings together film, video art, journalism, music, fashion and literature. Currently studying at the HFF Munich, she has shown several short films at exhibitions, shot music videos and in 2017 debuted as a writer with the novel “Still halten”. In her short feature, “pretty girls don’t lie”, Reisinger explores feminist thinking through its opposite by staging an extreme exaggeration of the male gaze, cliché roles and soap opera-like plots.

Jovana Reisinger
Whit Stillman

Whit Stillman

Film writer-director and novelist. Educated at Harvard, he became known for his first film “Metropolitan” which won the New York Film Critics “Best New Director” award & an Oscar nomination. “Barcelona” followed and then a series of films with female protagonists – “The Last Days of Disco,” “Damsels in Distress” and “Love & Friendship” – the first and last of which he also turned into novels.