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This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past

Forum Special Fiktionsbescheinigung 2022
© Cana Bilir-Meier (c) 2019
Two young women wander through a mall. They goof around, try on sunglasses, show off for the camera that is recording them on black-and-white Super 8 film and flick through photos of other people striking similar poses. A series of absurdly contradictory desires can be heard on the soundtrack – to predict the past, to rouse the alarm clock from sleep, to forget what one cannot remember. A day like any other, this could be any place, at any time. Then the date on a memorial plaque allows us to place the scene. We are at the Olympia Shopping Centre in Munich, where nine teenagers with an immigrant background were killed and others injured in a racist attack on July 22, 2016. The photos – plucked, as so often in Bilir-Meier's work, from her family archive – show scenes from "Düşler Ülkesi” (Land of Dreams), a play Bilir-Meier's mother helped put on whose 1982 premiere was delayed by a bomb scare.
Continuities and ruptures emerge between the everyday lives of migrants then and now, between youthful levity and the persistence of racist violence in Germany.
by Cana Bilir-Meier
with Sosuna Yıldız, Aleyna Osmanoğlu, Berfin Ünsal Germany / Austria 2019 English 16’ Black/White Documentary form

With

  • Sosuna Yıldız
  • Aleyna Osmanoğlu
  • Berfin Ünsal

Crew

Written and Directed by Cana Bilir-Meier
Cinematography Lichun Tseng
Editing Cana Bilir-Meier
Music Gustavo Kusnir, Nihan Devecioğlu
Casting Zühal Bilir-Meier
Producer Cana Bilir-Meier

Photos

Cana Bilir-Meier

© 2021 Aleyna Osmanoglu.

Born in 1986 in Munich, Germany. She studied art education and visual arts as well as film and works as a filmmaker, artist and art educator in Munich and Vienna.

Filmography

2013 Semra Ertan; 8 min. · Semra Ertan; 8 min. 2017 Bestes Gericht; 3 min. · Bestes Gericht; 3 min. 2019 This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past; 16 min., Forum 2022 · This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past; 16 min. 2022 Zwischenwelt (In-between World)

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2023