Wednesday, 13th February 2019 – 8pm

THE AMBASSADOR’S WIFE

D: Theresa Traore Dahlberg, DP: Iga Mikler, BF/SE 2018, 16 min., French OV w/ English subs – GP

An image is set up, the camera zooms and pans, not yet sure how it wants to capture the scene. In the meanwhile, the ambassador’s wife tries out a few different poses in her majestic living room with its tall columns and landscape of giant sofas. The camera documents everything with a wide-angle lens and from a low position, emphasising the setting’s absurdity even further. The director briefly walks into the picture, hides the lapel microphone’s radio transmitter, and disappears behind the camera again. Everything is staged in the life of Madame, the wife of the French ambassador to Burkina Faso. But she sings and laughs and doesn’t pay much attention to what others might think. Theresa Traore Dahlberg shows how disconnected a life can be from its environment, and how peculiar the everyday becomes when a person and their given role don’t coincide.

SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS

D: Virgil Vernier, Cast: Dewi Kunetz, Sandra Poitoux, Hugues Njiba-Mukuna, Bruck, Lilith Grasmug, DP: Simon Roca, Tom Harari, FR 2018, 98 min., French OV w/ English subs – GP

Have your breasts enlarged quickly, in time for the next casting; eat algae to stimulate muscle growth, so as to threaten violence more effectively. Virgil Vernier draws images at once beguiling and oppressive from Sophia Antipolis, this strange non-place between Cannes, Nice and Antibes on the Côte d’Azur, which was founded almost 50 years ago as a business park. Shooting on analogue film in the soft Mediterranean light, he follows two women who seek social contact and a group of individuals who turn into a posse of vigilantes at night. In turn trenchant and laconic, he observes the links between urban architecture and the loneliness of its inhabitants, as well as between the passion for appearances and the longing for spirituality. Up until the end, it remains ambiguous what about this world should be feared and what should be loved.

After the screening

Debate: IMPLANT

What do human zoos and golden cages have in common? What about culture and artifice? Change and convention? Regarding films that take people and urban spaces out of their contexts in order to invite reflection on utopias and dystopias.

Guests: Lili Hinstin (curator and festival director), Ulrich Köhler (director, “In My Room”, “Sleeping Sickness”) // in the presence of the director Virgil Vernier

Moderated by Nino Klingler (Berlin Critics’ Week)

Re-Run Friday, 15th February 2019 – 3.20 pm

Tickets