Scott Miller Berry, lead programmer of Toronto's Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival and a long-time collaborator of Goethe-Instituts from Toronto to Jakarta to Bangalore, attended the 68th Oberhausen Short Film Festival, the festival's first in-person edition since 2019. German Film @ Canada asked him to report back on highlights and critical takeaways in a 2-part festival report:
On to the films at the 68th Oberhausen Short Film Festival – starting with a timely opening film by one of six artists in Profile,
Rainer Komers. The festival opened with Komers' 30-minute 1980 black-and-white portrait of a Sinti Romani community who settled in the neighbouring city of Duisburg and were forcefully removed into traditional private housing.
Director Gass nicely bragged about his push to show an original (and somewhat decomposing) 16mm magnetic sound print of the film instead of a DCP digital transfer. It was a gift to watch the original film projected on the massive Lichtburg screen, and the discussion with some of the film's family members with filmmaker Komers was rich and diverse on representation and verité approaches to capturing daily lives in an intimate way.
Another
Profile saw the overdue foregrounding of the illuminating films of
Sylvia Schedelbauer. Eight films over two programs spanned the 2004 family archive reconstruction "Memories" to the 2020 "Labor of Love", a pulsing ode to love, nature, human connection and the inevitable (and sometimes tragic) losses.
The biggest treat was Schedelbauer's newest film "Oh, Butterfly!" that premiered in the German Competition program. This tour-de-force union of an imagined cassette tape playing Puccini's Madame Butterfly as interpreted by 60+ singers magically flits and flutters between archival footage from Edison to numerous Madame Butterfly films to 8mm home movies shot by her parents. This viewer also wonders whether the combination of these home movies and Schedelbauer herself repeatedly walking into frame alongside the mostly Western interpretations of Puccini's opera is also a personal reflection on Sylvia's bi-racial-ness and the realities of straddling both Asian and Western European histories. Watching Sylvia's films is the equivalent of a deep conversation with a trusted comrade/friend/lover -- it deeply touches my heart and my gut, and "Oh, Butterfly!" is no exception; truly a film to savour and savour again, ideally on a bright big screen with maximum operatic sound capabilities.
Also in Profile was a single program by New Delhi photographer and filmmaker Sohrab Hura; his film "
Bittersweet" (2019) continues to resonate deeply; told through photographs and filmed sequences, this diaristic film reflects on the filmmaker's mother's diagnosis of acute schizophrenia and its impacts on her life and their relationship. Hura's newest film "
The Coast" (2020) is, like many of his films, connected to a photography publication. Hura on the conjoining of media: "If I were to merely reproduce the film in a book, it would strait-jacket the work into a single meaning, but for me the beauty of photography lies in its malleability and multiplicity of existences and meanings."
These Profiles, along with a large number of filmmakers in many sections from across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, reflect a noticeable shift in Oberhausen's programming away from Western Europe and North American dominance.
The German programs are often more enlightening than the International Competition, although there are many gems in the rough throughout all of the varied sections at Oberhausen. My only gripe continues to be that the festival does not provide English interpretation for German Competition post-show discussions.
This year, one of my favourite films was "
Elle" by Luise Donschen in the German Competition, an illuminating portrait of a visit to the Botanical Garden wherein a father and his daughter lose each other and each have their own random encounters along sun-drenched paths. They then meet and visit a riverbed serenaded by an invisible musician. A beautiful meditative portrait.
A different kind of reflection is produced watching the latest mind-blowing tour de force "Homesick" from stalwart
Bjørn Melhus (German Competition), where Melhus plays every character, performing lines from various apocalyptic films: a glorious, hypnotic, fear-filled and fearless take on COVID-19 and its isolating impacts.
The regional North Rhine-Westphalia program included multiple impressive shorts, including "Cruiser" by Nils Ramme and Felix Bartke from Cologne, a 22' documentary about subcultures in Oberhausen that centre biking (motorized and manual) and explores non-traditional versions of masculinity in the process. In the same program I loved the hand drawn animated film "Fulfillmenot" by Julia Jesionek (also from Cologne) that takes us through a stream-of-consciousness journey-meets-Rube Golberg machine of body exploration, human interconnectedness and existential dread. Closing out this program was a divine sensory experience called "
Aquateque" by Einar Fehrholz, Daria Jelonek and Perry-James Sugden (Fehrholz lives in Oberhausen, the latter duo comprise the London-based studio Above & Below) "Aquateque" explores the local Ruhr River from its source in the Rothaar Mountains to the mouth into the Rhine near Duisburg and samples audio from the river alongside 3D digital scans and video of the river and its surroundings.
Oberhausen commits a large part of its programming to archival, historical and/or retrospective-related works -- quite rare at a festival of this size. The section
ARCHIVES this year included Cinenova (UK), Lumiton (Argentina) and ZKM (Germany). Guest-programmed themes often highlight historical works and solo artist profiles providing a great overview of an artist's oeuvre. In 2018 they added
RE_SELECTED (curated by Tobias Hering) into the ARCHIVES section to delve deeper into the screenings and submissions of the near seven-decade history of Oberhausen itself.
One of my favourite programs this year was seeing the selection
COUNTER ENCOUNTERS by Merv Espina (Manila) as part of his ongoing media archaeology into the histories of the seminal Goethe-Institut Film Workshops held around the world between the 1970s and 1990s. This program included a wide mix of gems from South-East Asia, East Asia and a 16mm structural film by stalwart Goethe film instructor Christof Janetzko (Germany). Standouts included the sensuous 16mm film "Wet Dream" (1992) by Kim Yun Tae (South Korea), which preceded another film about desire and boundaries -- "Under Taboo" (1992) by Jerdsak Poolthup, Pimpaka Towira, Sirivan Pothai and Sasivimon Chaungyanyong (Thailand); also in this program were stunning mash ups addressing sex and sexuality, imperialism and "the commercial and libidinal complexes of colonization" in the films "Kalawang/Rust" (1989) by Cesar Hernando, Eli Guieb and Jimbo Albano and "Spit/Optik" (1988) by Rox Lee (all from the Philippines).
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the celluloid-focused sections
LABS and
CELLULOID EXPANDED, each assembled with openness and in the spirit of expanding the film-on-film tent by Vassily Bourikas (Athens) and Erin Weisgerber (Montréal), respectively.
LABS was built around "workshop" films and included film labs from Cairo, Mumbai, Brussels, Vienna, Milan, Vancouver, Berlin, Barcelona and more and closed with a program of newly made creations from the four-day Film Farm workshop I had the pleasure of co-leading. The live performance section included a multiverse of approaches and immersions in analogue and digital projections by Heidi Philips with Ian Campbell (Winnipeg and Regina), Alex Mackenzie (Vancouver), John Price (Toronto), Karl Lemieux with BJ Nilsen (Montréal) and a stunning multi-16mm projection performance by Vancouver's Lindsay McIntyre that vividly wove footage of environmental catastrophe, resource extraction, demonstrations for Indigenous land rights alongside neoliberal posturing.
The other performance I cannot stop thinking about (and a fitting way to close my garrulous summary) was the final festival event before the Awards Ceremony and closing screening -- the stunning "
Two Times in one Space" lecture-performance by Maximillian Le Cain (Dublin) and Lea Lanoë (Marseille) -- a dual 16mm projector piece entirely shot, processed and written during
and about the 68th Oberhausen Festival… film developed in a hotel bathroom, just for the record! Le Cain's text is a rumination-meets-review of
(in instigator Bourikas' words) "a festival that perhaps once happened, or even a festival that might never happen." It included memorable lines such as "after watching 5 programs each day I still felt like I've seen nothing at the festival." Indeed.
Kudos to the Oberhausen team for pulling off the first in-person festival in three years and re-igniting our passions for short films, deep connections and engaged viewing. Until next time --
bis nächstes Mal --
à la prochaine!
Scott Miller Berry is a short filmmaker and cultural worker living in Toronto. By day he is Managing Director at Workman Arts, an arts + mental health organization that presents the Rendezvous With Madness Festival where he leads the film programming committee. Previously, he served for 10 years as Executive Director at the Images Festival. Scott is a film festival believer and has co-instigated many collective projects including the 8 fest small gauge film festival, MICE Magazine, Early Monthly Segments and current itinerant programming project, re:assemblage collective. His film “ars memorativa” screened in competition at Oberhausen in 2014 after debuting at Experimenta India in Bangalore. Recent screenings include New York, VUCAVU, London UK, Jakarta, Lisbon, Ottawa, Seoul, Montréal and Colectivo Toronto.
image courtesy S. Miller Berry: Merv Espina (Manila) presented his research on the global Goethe-Institut Film Workshops from the 1970s to the 1990s.
