For our big “Post-Oil City” cluster this season, I have curated a program of shorts called The Future of Energy as part of the exhibition "Post-Oil City – The History of the City’s Future", screening for free at Evergreen Brick Works’ kiln --see last photo of our opening-- every day until July 31.
The films from run the gamut from doc to comedy, from animation to the experimental. All look at our environment, energy, behaviour, consumerism and change in roundabout ways that will hopefully make you look differently at the world and how we shape it.
Below is a visual sneak peek at one of these shorts. WAS ÜBRIG BLEIBT (LEFT BEHIND, but literally translated also meaning "What Remains") is a 13-minute German doc from 2008 by Fabian Daub & Andreas Gräfenstein about the illegal coal mining by desperate former miners in Poland, a stark portrait of a post-communist, post-system breakdown need to survive. In Waldenburg, situated in the Lower Silesian coalfields, Lukasz and his friend Jacek have been digging coal at their own risk for years in the defunct mines. The local police are constantly after them, but they keep going.
The film won an astounding number of awards, among others Best Documentary at the Tampere International Film Festival, the Tirana International Film Festival and the Manlleu Short Film Festival; the Grand Prizes at Shoot me Film Festival Den Haag and the Pärnu International Documentary Film Festival; the Critics' Award and the Audience Award at Young Collection Filmbüro Bremen; Best International Documentary at Curtocircuito International Short Film Festival, Santiago de Compostela; as well as the German Economic Film Award in Bronze -- making it a perfect fit for both our City+Climate as well as our Culture+Economy focus.
In two weeks, I will highlight another of the shorts in this program (meanwhile off to Berlin). I hope you get to see the 40-minute film loop at Evergreen in the meantime. Let me know which short was your favourite!
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
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