Eastern Elegies - Reflections of a Bygone Era

Part of the transnational initiative Arsenal on Location, this year's collaboration between BIEFF and Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art (one of the festival's long-standing partners) is a direct reflection on the central theme of our current edition, inviting viewers to discover and embrace the community potential of cinema. This present program, Eastern Elegies - Reflections of a Bygone Era (one of the two that resulted from our collaboration this year), is dedicated to critically questioning dominant ideological attributions within the former states of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. The program also explores a series of aesthetic and political convergences specific to this geopolitical space and how they are understood and recovered from a contemporary perspective. In Anna Zett's two films ENDARCHIV and AFRAID DOESN'T EXIST, layers of historical and personal memory are uncovered. In GRANDMAMAUNTSISTERCAT, Zuza Banasińska transforms film material once produced for educational and propaganda purposes in communist Poland into an autofictional matriarchal place of memory in an act of artistic resistance, while In her collage of Central Asian films from the Arsenal archive, WHO'S VOICE IS THIS?, Dana Iskakova traces the influence of Soviet ideology on films from the 1960s to the 1990s and documents the creeping erosion and effects of Perestroika. The program is curated by Angelika Ramlow on behalf of the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art.

Whose Voice is This?

Dana Iskakova, Saodat Ismailova | Duration 10'

WHOSE VOICE IS THIS? explores the soundscapes of the collection of Central Asian films in the Arsenal archive. By examining dubbed voices, background effects, and original soundtracks, the work traces Soviet ideology’s influence on films from the 1960s to the 1990s, capturing its gradual erosion and the impact of Perestroika.

Grandmamauntsistercat

Zuza Banasińska | Duration 23'

Created from materials garnered from the Polish Educational Archive, GRANDMAMAUNTSISTERCAT tells the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems.

Afraid Doesn’t Exist

Anna Zett | Duration 31'

A defunct police state is experienced both as a source of nebulous horror, and as a site of political and poetic self-empowerment. Anna Zett combines film and sound material from the Berlin archives of the GDR opposition with poetry and music from the time, showing the charged period of transition in Germany between 1986 and 1990.

Endarchiv

Anna Zett | Duration 18'

Endarchiv examines the symbolic process of disposal and forgetting while raising the question how to take care of the emotional and performative remains of the GDR and its oppositional movements. The film maker Anna Zett is seen spray painting short questions and statements onto large mounds of pebble gravel, where every step leads to a rockslide. The action is interspersed with found footage filmed by Klaus Freymuth, showing artists and demonstrators painting and writing onto the East side of the Berlin Wall shortly after the border was opened in November 1989.