Forum 2015:
Searching for Evidence

Reinterpretations of classic topics and motifs are a focus of this year's Forum. How did this come about?

The focus emerges as the programme is being created. We gradually build upon the films we select at the start. We only establish the core themes of what's currently preoccupying filmmakers whilst watching the hundreds or even thousands of submitted films. Only then do we start seeking out connections and following the lines we've discovered. Out of this emerge thematic strands like these reversions to or complete reinterpretations of motifs which could be as old as Greek mythology or as relatively new as an unfinished Kafka novel.

What is the most radical reinterpretation?

I find the Blade Runner remake Sueñan los androides (Androids Dream) extremely radical because it completely forgoes any art direction and simply reinterprets an existing location: the town of Benidorm with its tower-blocks by the sea. The director Ion de Sosa became inspired and realised he didn't need to build any sets because Benidorm provides everything. And for anyone with previous knowledge of Philip K Dick's novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?', upon which Blade Runner was also based, this opens up a highly bizarre new perspective. You can also understand it as an experiment in discovering just how far you can reduce the story you want to tell. And out of this minimalism emerges an abundance of riches.

Cinema: A Public Affair by Tatiana Brandrup depicts the Russian film historian Naum Kleiman who has a very specific idea of cinema. Does this concept also apply to the Forum?

Do the various films take different approaches to documentary material?

Strange Victory from 1948 and The 81st Blow from 1977 are films which, due to their age, are obviously not up to current standards of the approach to documentary: they are rather classical documentaries. Both work a lot with archive material. What makes them interesting is their enduringly topical subject matters. Even though it was made 67 years ago, Strange Victory could be a film about the current situation. It shows racism in the USA. America is celebrating the victory over fascism in Europe but is still far from conquering its own inherent fascism – and you automatically think about everything that has happened recently from Ferguson to New York. The film laments not only racism against black people – for example, after the war black fighter pilots failed to secure jobs in civilian aviation simply because they had the wrong skin colour. The film also laments the anti-Semitism in the USA which also resulted in terrible excesses there. Of course this hatred didn't become state policy in America but it has still not been fully overcome even to this day.

The 81st Blow is a milestone regarding the use of archive material for educational purposes. Film is used here as a witness statement and, mixed with the sound recordings from the Eichmann trial, it becomes an evidence base which rebuts the Holocaust deniers and doubts about the Jewish opposition. In this way a film can vindicate truth.

Today, documentaries take a much more playful approach to documentary material. Are there reasons for this?

Filmmakers have to take into account that viewers have become accustomed to the possibilities of images. When audiences weren't so replete with moving images, documentary pictures could develop a more suggestive power. Today it's possible to handle the material in a much more ironic and subtle way. Filmmakers need to find a different level because viewers are no longer so easily impressed. Faking images is much more widespread nowadays and audiences are consequently more sceptical.

Does Out of the Forest intentionally forego archive footage or are there simply no images available?

The film intentionally eschews it, in the same way Claude Lanzmann did in Shoah. It is an alternative approach which, possibly in response to films like The 81st Blow, says: 'We're going the opposite way. We're not seeking to prove something with images; instead we want to evoke memories and stimulate the imagination, which the viewers have to create for themselves and which we will not dictate to them.

Let's remain with stories about time or in time. With Futaba kara toku hanarete dainibu (Nuclear Nation II) you have the sequel to Nuclear Nation from 2012 in the programme. What has happened during these past three years?

The first part was about a mayor who, after his town was more or less obliterated by the tsunami and the nuclear catastrophe, sought to hold his community together in an emergency shelter. The town had massively benefited from the nuclear industry, almost everyone was employed within it. The mayor tried to make them embrace a new point of view. In the first film this was representative of a very big change in perspective in the whole of Japan. Nuclear Nation II now establishes that, three years later, everything has returned to how it was before. The community has broken up, the mayor has been deposed. The film is the hard-edged and necessary epilogue to the first part, which was rather more rousing and hopeful.

Three years ago we spoke about the lack of images, the invisibility of the nuclear radiation threatening everything. Do the consequences of the radiation manifest themselves as images today?

La sirène de Faso Fani and Über die Jahre are good examples of the way films in our programme enter into a dialogue with each other. Ten years ago Nikolaus Geyrhalter visited a textile factory in Austria's Waldviertel on the border with the Czech Republic. He first observed – which is comparable to the method used in Il gesto delle mani – which kind of work the people were faced with there and the seemingly ancient machinery. Then the textile factory closed down and he decided to remain with the people he had by then been watching for over ten years as they became unemployed or found new jobs of a very different nature – a highly fascinating long-term observation. La sirène de Faso Fani tells a similar story, but seen in reverse. This film also deals with a closed down textile factory. Michel K Zongo looks at the past and in doing so not only tells the story of Burkino Faso, whose exemplary socialist programme was replaced by an ugly form of neo-liberalism, which this textile factory also fell victim to in 2001. Instead of just concentrating on the collapse of the factory, he depicts the people’s determination to continue with their handicraft and thus to uphold the reputation of this work. During the filming they reunite and decide to form a new model rather like a cooperative. It is also interesting that this very highly regarded Faso Fani textile factory, which was described as being the height of modernity, had just about the same machinery as the factory in Austria which, due to it being outdated, closed down at around the same time. It's really fascinating to see both films in correlation.

Ok, the final question: are you looking forward to your return to the Akademie der Künste?

Oh yes, absolutely. It's a really wonderful location which is excellently suited to bringing together our film programme with the one from Forum Expanded, including the exhibitions. The Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg is much more appealing as a place to linger than the rather industrial locations here on Potsdamer Platz.