Negotiating an Ocean of Time (IC & GC) / Maintaining the Connection (IC & GC) / The idiosyncratic beauty of the present (NRW) / The world of objects strikes back (MuVi) / Animal Transformations (Children & Youth)

A dog eats a fish, followed by an interview sequence shot in black and white. A mother speaks of her son, one of the many who disappeared during the war. But the woman’s voice cannot be heard; we are left with only her physical presence and, in an intimate moment, see her face contort as she weeps. Then a cut to a forest, a close-up of her face, shots of the people recording the interview. Rajee Samarasinghe’s A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth (29 April, 3 pm, International Competition, Tickets) is a visually powerful collage of documentary images, shot in a region of Sri Lanka still occupied by the Sinhalese military.

Cinema, whether short or feature-length films, can be a place where experiences are recounted and thus find their visual expression. Even the terrible ones. For example, in films which, like many entries in this year’s competition programmes, deal with memory and attempts to come to terms with the past: narratives of individual fates that strike a direct chord.

an open field, also screened in the International Competition (30 April, 8 pm, Tickets), similarly refuses to present a clear-cut picture: an attempt to come to terms with the experience of loss and grief by giving both a place. The “open field” is the crash site of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on 10 March 2019, when a Boeing 737 MAX crashed six minutes after take-off, killing all 157 people on board. The South African-German director Teboho Edkins, whose brother was among the victims, visits the village near the field with his father and a camera, documenting the villagers’ mourning rituals from the inside, as a participant, so to speak. They talk with other relatives of the deceased and the father of the pilot, who was held responsible for the crash by the Lufthansa Group. The camera becomes an instrument of the grieving process: an open field is an example of a film in which the filmmaker’s attempt to come to terms with the tragedy is not simply documented or staged for the camera. The act of filmmaking, the creation of the images, is itself part of the grieving process and has a cathartic effect. Edkins weeps whilst shooting his film, and the images increasingly convey this sense of grief to the audience. They seek to tell of loss and of how it can be shared and, in this way, perhaps healed.

In contrast, Qui a tué Narin G****? (Who Killed Narin G****?, 1 May, 5 pm, International Competition, Tickets) by director Ayçe Kartal deals with a cover-up, an attempt to erase what happened. The real-life case on which this true-crime short film, presented in cartoon format, is based: in August 2024, the eight-year-old Narin Güran was killed by her family. Parts of the community in the village in south-eastern Turkey where Narin lived helped to cover up the crime and hide the body. Kartal has created a kind of surreal dreamscape from drawings reminiscent of pictures painted by children. The film speculates that Narin may have seen something she shouldn’t have seen. The combination of a childlike visual aesthetic and the knowledge of the crime makes Qui a tué Narin G****? a competition entry that is as moving as it is harrowing.

Secrets are also the subject of Secretos a voces (Open Secrets, 1 May, 5 pm, International Competition, Tickets), which is also screening in the International Competition. A playful and cleverly constructed cinematic experiment that intertwines the past and the future in a fascinating way.

Family history is also the subject of TEÊMBA! (FLOW!, 2 May, 11 am, International Competition, Tickets) by Rwandan filmmaker Kagoma Ya Twahirwa, though here, as in A Flower Falling Back Into the Earth, it is once again linked to collective trauma. It begins with an interview filmed in stark black and white, in which a young man talks about how he is trying to connect with his father, who was killed in the genocide and whom he never knew. “I hear about the history and it breaks my heart so much” is the central line in TEÊMBA!, before it shifts to colour and becomes a collage of dream images, news footage and documentary shots from a Tutsi village. All linked by the softly pulsating sound of waves and the second central line, which applies to TEÊMBA!, but also to all the other films mentioned here: “The times that have passed, they always come back.”

The beautiful Let Me Circle Around You (1 May, 17 pm, International Competition, Tickets) by director Aiya Akilzhanova seeks to capture the all-encompassing power of the past in images. These images revolve around a Kazakh word, whispered time and again, which cannot be easily translated: ‘ainalayin’. It refers to the unspoken connections between the past and the present: We see images of memory, the play of light, old home videos, pictures of loved ones, in a stream of images both magnetic and gentle. This is what cinema can do, time and again: to capture the past for a moment in such a way that, as Aiya Akilzhanova puts it, it can overcome an “ocean of time”.

Benjamin Moldenhauer

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Screenings
International Competition: 29 April – 3 May, Programme schedule
German Competition: 2 and 3 May, Programme schedule

For many of us, migration is the reason we are here – as refugees, displaced persons, or migrant workers. Or as their descendants, in some cases over generations. This year, many films in the Oberhausen competitions offer moving and artistic reflections on what you leave behind or carry within you when migrating, and how you must try to come to terms with it: with gallows humour, painful attachment, with friendship, down-to-earthness and tenderness – and an existential sense of unreality.

What remains of the ‘identity’ you once had, the proof of which the authorities keep asking for? Do you still exist? What’s left of it, without your people, far from home, suddenly in uniform, your hair shaved off? A small group of young Ukrainian friends spend one last relaxed, intimate evening together on 9 February 2022, just before the Russian invasion, in the heart-wrenching Movchat' Ptakhy (The Birds Are Silent, dir. Leo Dzhyshyashvili, 3 May, 3 pm, Tickets), which is screening in the German Competition. One individual finds themselves as an animated, indefinable fragment of desires and fears in Until It’s Hard to Tell (dir. Ceren Oykut, 3 May, 11 am, German Competition, Tickets) and must search for words in a broken language. In Vidkrytyi svit (Homecoming, 1 May, 5 pm, International Competition, Tickets) by filmmakers Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, a young man who has fled Ukraine sends his avatar in the form of a droll, energetic robot dog –the kind normally used for military purposes – back home to make contact with those left behind. But even the cat barely recognises him. “Cats don’t usually show their feelings,” his mum consoles him, before the phone connection cuts out again and she sadly calls out his name.

In Maryam Zuhuri’s Letters from Home (29 April, 8 pm, International Competition, Tickets), a woman who has fled across the Turkish-Iranian border stacks endless cartons of eggs in a temporary job in her place of asylum, thinking of her family far away. The two elderly people in Prayer for All Simple Things (dir. Diego Rojas, 2 May, 8 pm, International Competition, Tickets) are washing dishes in the USA even on Thanksgiving Day, eking out a life as near-invisibles grateful for small things: “3,652 sunsets since we fled, and whether or not we are loved here: it’s worth it.” A team helps young refugee boxers with fun and camaraderie in Knockout Dreams by Andreas Birkenheier (2 May, 5 pm, German Competition, Tickets). But for how long, and “what if one of us is deported and we never see each other again?”

How does one find the right words? And what value judgement do they imply? What is one allowed to say, and what not? In 1970, the WDR launched a competition to find a new word for ‘Gastarbeiter’ (guest worker) and offered a bizarre list of prizes – ranging from a Ford GT to a wall-to-wall carpet including installation, to a round of beers at one’s regular pub. The 30,000 entries ranged from friendly to ugly and hostile. In Ein neues Wort (A New Word), screened in the German Competition (2 May, 1 pm, Tickets) a Munich choir of long-term migrant workers, mostly of Turkish origin, is now turning the entries into song lyrics amidst laughter and fun, whilst filmmaker Cana Bilir-Meier looks on: “But don’t film our bellies!”. Yulia Lokshina’s How Do You Spell This Word? (3 May, 11 am, German Competition, Tickets) shows how a teacher who fled Russia during the war in Ukraine re-enacts the reason for her flight with her new class in Germany: When she spoke out critically against the war in class, a pupil secretly recorded her, and his parents denounced her – influenced by propaganda that labels such criticism “unpatriotic” or even “fascist”. Finally, in Chan Hau Chun’s Gei3 Yik1 Jo6 Biu1 (Map of Traces, 2 May, 8 pm, german Competition, Tickets), an exhausted-looking friendly old man leafs through his notebook. The delicate drawings inside were once displayed on the walls of his city, Hong Kong, as a sign of mourning for the protest movements’ victims. When he was forbidden to do so, he continued to paint invisibly, using water. It was important to him to maintain that connection. And that is what each of these films is about.

Silvia Szymanski

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Screenings
International Competition: 29 April – 3 May, Programme schedule
German Competition: 2 and 3 May, Programme schedule

Dreams of the future on a skate park in Kyrgyzstan, the tender, erotic caressing of an old car, 142,000 years of water-carrying – it really isn’t easy to find a common thread linking the themes of the NRW Competition without stretching the concept too far. And that is good news for an audience that can perhaps expect the biggest surprises from this youngest Oberhausen competition.

Nine films with production bases in North Rhine-Westphalia were selected from over 260 submissions. Three of these are university films from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne; the remaining six are independent works. What is striking this year is that only a minority of the selected NRW films are actually set in the far west of Germany. Instead, the programme takes us on a journey around the world, and in doing so, casually challenges well-established genre conventions. Rainer Komers’ documentary Kamogawa (1 May, 8 pm, Tickets), for instance, portrays people on the so-called Wild Duck River in Kyoto, who go about their business in a peculiar state of contemplation and with few words: a film which, through its distinctive rhythm, delivers classic portraiture whilst naturally inviting deep reflection on life. Irfan Akcadag’s in Kenger (1 May, 3 pm, Tickets) also chooses a rather quiet manner to tell the story of a young girl harvesting thistles in Anatolia who hopes to save up for a new pair of shoes by selling homemade chewing gum: motifs straight out of a fairy tale, presented to us with the sharpness and precision of a documentary. Eine Tochter und zehn Söhne (A Daughter and Ten Sons, 1 May, 3 pm, Tickets) by Paula Milena Weise and Finn Ole Weigt, meanwhile, follows two young women in Kyrgyzstan who, amidst post-Soviet gloom, pin their hopes on the US Green Card lottery – a narrative that oscillates between global political crisis and coming-of-age drama.

But remarkable stories can also be told at domestic locations, as Maximilian Karakatsanis demonstrates with Beneath the Night (1 May, 8 pm, Tickets) – arguably with the most prominent cast. Peter Schneider, a well-known actor from the German TV series Polizeiruf Halle, plays a metro driver called Kerl (bloke), who has become the face of a marketing campaign for his transport company and now stares down from posters in buses, trains and at stops, still in uniform. The camera follows Kerl in the train’s driver’s cab through endless tunnels, into deserted stations in the early hours of the morning, or into the solitude of his meal break. This film, too, is rather taciturn, struggling to find the right words for the problem – let alone clear solutions. Once, after finishing work, Kerl tries to call the advertising agency. But here, too, we never learn what drives him. No one picks up the phone.

Or KOMMUNIST KAR KOMMANDOS (1 May, 8 pm, Tickets) by Markus Mischkowski and Christos Dassios, which, with deliberate slowness, celebrates the cleaning – no: caressing – of an old Wartburg in close-up. One could read these three and a half minutes as a re-enactment and homage to Kenneth Anger’s 1965 classic Kustom Kar Kommandos; yet here and now, it is no longer merely a matter of probing the homoerotic content of the male love of cars. Rather, this nostalgic twist is aimed at experimental film itself and at the GDR, from which the Wartburg hails – and not by chance. But is this love? Parody or deconstruction? The answer remains elusive.

This openness runs through the entire competition this year: the decidedly ambitious programme is rarely explicitly political, but is arguably more thoughtful than in previous years. Resignation in the face of multiple crises hangs like a threatening shadow over the films, without, however – and this is important – gaining the upper hand. Of course, it sounds bleak when the narrator in Miri Klischat’s Garden of Edie (1 May, 8 pm, Tickets) begins her story by saying that as a teenager she wanted to be a writer and now makes a living from sex work. Yet by the end, we learn that this is not a tale of failure, but that she has actually used that very money to buy herself the time to write.

And perhaps there is a common thread running through the programme after all: namely, the courage to endure contradictions, not to give up when things get complicated, and simply to let reality in all its complexity take effect, rather than constantly explaining it. Sure, it’s a bit exhausting. But it’s worth it, because at some point it does grab you: the idiosyncratic beauty of a present that is anything but rosy.

Jan-Paul Koopmann

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Screenings
1 May, 3 pm, Lichtburg Tickets 
1 May, 8 pm, Lichtburg Tickets

Repetition
2 May, 6 pm, Kino im Walzenlager Tickets
2 May, 8 pm, Kino im Walzenlager, Tickets

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