71st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 29 April – 4 May 2025
The 2025 Profiles
Oberhausen is presenting the works of Dóra Maurer, Dietrich Schubert and Susanna Wallin
Oberhausen’s Profiles series is traditionally dedicated to artists and filmmakers who work consistently with the short format. The three 2025 Profiles are dedicated to the Hungarian artist Dóra Maurer, the Eifel-based directing couple Dietrich and Katharina Schubert, and Swedish-American filmmaker Susanna Wallin.
Dóra Maurer: The Cohering Force of an Artwork
Wednesday, 30 April and Saturday, 3 May 2025
Dóra Maurer, born in 1937, is considered one of the major figures of the Hungarian Neo-Avant-garde. As an artist, filmmaker and exhibition organiser, she works with print, painting, photography – and experimental film. Oberhausen will present the most comprehensive show to date outside Hungary of Maurer’s principal cinematic works in two programmes, selected by film critic and curator Simon Petri-Lukács.
Repetitions, permutations, basic, alchemically reduced situations which unfold themselves as metric and structural elaborations, are the basic principles of Maurer’s cinematic works. The permutations of planes, spatial objects, lights and shadows, the metaphorization of a bed sheet or the body as a ruler, the constant interchanging of abstraction and figures, and the interbreeding of still and motion, painting and film, playfulness and rigidity: Trace-leaving and displacement pervade all these works, and allow Maurer to stage the very essence of film: the trace of a body on the film strip.
The programme will be introduced by art historian Emese Kürti, Head of the Research Department and Deputy Director at the Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI).
Dietrich and Katharina Schubert. From the Coal to the Trees, never to Return
Wednesday, 30 April to Saturday, 3 May 2025
Oberhausen marks the occasion of Dietrich Schubert’s approaching 85th birthday by presenting a retrospective of his and Katharina Schubert’s works from a career as filmmakers and political documentarists spanning almost 50 years. From political departure to environmental issues, from working conditions in the city and in the country to the newly found home in the Eifel, the Profile, compiled by film critic André Malberg and curator Lydia Kayß, follows Schubert’s development as a filmmaker in chronological order.
The paradigms and contexts of Dietrich Schubert’s early works – student protests, the Vietnam War, German rearmament, Emergency Acts, trouble at home and abroad, the magical number of the political left: 68 – testify to the solidarity in Schubert’s decidedly left-wing gaze. With the couple’s move to the Eifel region in the 1980s, the subjects change – their gaze now focuses on the existences and attitudes of their new home, whether they are rural workers from small Eifel villages or workers in former industrial locations in crisis. Their basic impetus – to see and to show – remains the same.
In four programmes, Oberhausen is presenting an overview of a consistently political oeuvre infused by a constant interest in people.
The following guests are expected: Katharina and Dietrich Schubert, Thomas Ochs, Günter Wallraff and Annika Braun.
Susanna Wallin: Inhabiting Unstructured Time
Friday, 2 May and Sunday, 4 May
Susanna Wallin was born in Lund, Sweden, and currently lives and works between London and Tampa, USA. Her award-winning films have been shown in both cinema and gallery contexts, Oberhausen has regularly screened her films in competition.
Wallin’s digitally-shot short films, infused with her interest in “unstructured time”, delicately calibrate intersecting and divergent durations in which humans. Her protagonists, most often prepubescent or adolescent, or outsiders, vacillate between poles of anticipation and dissipation, irruption and lassitude in conjunction with the nonhuman temporalities of plants, animals, buildings and the weather.
Oberhausen is presenting a selection of Wallin’s works in two programmes, from Lapse (2006) to Lizzy (2024), curated by Wallin herself and accompanied by talks between the filmmaker and the novelist, memoirist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo (Writer in Residence, UCL London).
Programme information and tickets:
https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets
The accreditation deadline for the 71st Festival is on 23 April 2025
Oberhausen, 16 April 2025
Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, phone +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.de