All the guests of the 5th Berlin Critics’ Week

What do Hanna Schygulla and Albert Serra understand by vanity, what do they have to say about empathy? And will Aaron Schimberg and Horst Bredekamp get wise to their ideas? How does Nathan Silver’s cinema relate to privilege and to the civil war in Syria? How can knowledge which has been misappropriated by colonial powers be depicted and discussed? All the guests of the Berlin Critics’ Week have been chosen and will soon sit down in front of the screen of the Hackesche Höfe cinema.

In her film “Fausto”, Canadian anthropologist Andrea Bussmann deals with the visible and the invisible, the living and the unimaginable. We are interested in how her film questions modern Western ideas of knowledge and cognition, as well as the tradition of ethnographic film. Given her expertise on suppressed knowledge and colonialism, we welcome South African artist and filmmaker Kitso Lynn Lelliott, whose practice deals, among other things, with ghost phenomena. She will join the discussion alongside Argentinian film critic and festival curator Roger Koza, who has been dealing with the international perception of Latin American cinema for years – for example, in his Vitrina programmes at Filmfest Hamburg and at the Viennale. (Debate “Dark Matter” on Friday, 8.2.)

To tell lies as a gesture towards truth? To make things up in order to be sure of yourself? Nathan Silver is one of the most stubborn filmmakers in contemporary American cinema. He embraces his passion for protagonists who constantly reinvent themselves by freely drawing from the French New Wave and the enthusiasm for improvisation of American mumblecore. His film “The Great Pretender” meets “Maman, Maman, Maman” by Lucia Margarita Bauer, who deals with power structures and interpretive authority within her family history. Another director will join as a guest: with her film debut “Coma” (Berlin Critics’ Week 2016), Sara Fattahi created one of the most penetrating studies on Syria’s current state of emergency, showing a family of women who come up with an unexpected life plan in their apartment. The media artist Britta Thie stages herself and others as a projection screen; she is an expert on currencies and valuations in technological times. In film and stage productions such as “Translantics” or “The Superhost,” she ironically examines popular formats and their inability to fundamentally rethink something. (Debate “Invention with Benefits” on Saturday, February 9)

Aaron Schimberg (“Go Down Death”), an unmistakable new voice of US cinema, meets the prolific Catalan cinema eccentric Albert Serra (“Story of My Death”, “The Death of Louis XIV”). On the evening, their films “Chained for Life” and “Roi Soleil” will bring together the French Sun King, a beautiful film actress, and a vain exploitation director who sounds suspiciously like Werner Herzog. The conversation between the two directors, the acting icon Hanna Schygulla and the art historian Horst Bredekamp (“Theorie des Bildakts”, “Art as a Medium of Social Conflicts”) will introduce the notion of “Empathy for Vanity”. Bredekamp knows how the image becomes the body and the body becomes the image. After her formative work with Fassbinder, Hanna Schygulla stood in front of the camera for some of the loudest directors in international auteur cinema. Who better to talk about the advantages of vanity and empathy in cinema? (Debate “Empathy for Vanity” on Sunday, February 10)

The guests of the other evenings had been announced previously. All guests at a glance.