Documentary Woche Hamburg – Escape and Family

With their skill of being ahead of the historical development for head length, this year’s Hamburg documentary week focused on the focus, which is concerned with the rights like nothing else: migration. However, the topic has accepted a new color since Donald Trump took office. Finally the fainting of the distributors and the growing power of the displaced persons shows. Most recently, Florida’s governor Ron Desantis announced that because he was missing from the masses of harvest helpers due to the massive deportations, he is expanding child labor.

You may not recognize it everywhere, but the people who are driven out will not only be missing, the world will soon be. Morally, they are superior to us anyway. A brilliant scene in “Prisoners of Fate” by Mehdi Saebi proves that: Christmas should write down their greatest wish for Christmas in a Swiss preschool. Little Elmira, whose parents from Iran are refugee Afghans, wants her six -year -old brother, to whom the authorities refuse to enter. On the other hand, her friend wants to be rich. Elmira warns him to exchange the family for Fränkli.

Family or money, solidarity or reign – that often seems to be the alternative. But although family is the last retreat, it now stands more for separation than in common. In “Tempi Passati” by Kristina Konrad, who was devoted to a work show in Hamburg, the commonality between mother and daughter only restores after a long time, in which the daughter took part in the Sandinista revolution. Now she is watching the decline of the old lady to read on their ever slow cleaning rituals, which the film cut does not abbreviate.

Family has something conservative, often reactionary. This is what Samira El Mouzzhibati tells in her very intimate “Les Miennes/(Y) Our Mother”. The Morocco mother of the filmmaker is married to a boy from the neighboring village. Both move to Belgium, where the man is pushing the woman to adapt to European conditions. He even goes to the cinema with her – from whose violence she is deeply disgusted. Now she takes the veil again and also holds against her five emancipated daughters on her rebellion against violent modernity.

Family can bring speechlessness and trauma how two touching short films show: in “O Ma/Before then” Mengzhu XUe shared her beloved grandmother (in English, a language that the old Chinese does not understand) the secret of being lined up with a friend for seven years. “I would have preferred to make another film” by Suse Itzel reports on the abuse by a father who – irritating detail – studied with Theodor W. Adorno. Both films are particularly visually strong, perhaps because they cannot illustrate their secret (XUE) or their trauma (Itzel) and are therefore forced to indirect forms of expression.

Back to migration again. Not all films that take up the topic choose the nearby setting. “Landscape and Madry” by Nicole Vögele holds the human hikes panoramatically, almost monumental. In »La Base« (the base) Vadim Dumesh portrays the taxi drivers from all over the world at the Paris Airport Charles de Gaulle – and they portray themselves with cell phone cameras. While you are waiting for a bet, play trumpet, sing karaoke, pray or clean. Above all, they prove to be great philosophers who see the end. Already with self -driving cars, with Uber and the concrete landscape of the new base, the »ère de rien« (epoch of nothing) is approaching the Jacques Dutronc.

In Hamburg there was a subjective view of the past, but sometimes you would have liked more objectivity. Kamal Aljafari worked artistically in »A Fidai Film« shocking cinematic documents from the history of Palestine, which on the one hand takes her historicality, on the other hand, lets you freeze to timeless terror: Palestine 100 years ago, Palestine today – it is the same pictures. Milisuthando Bongela-Davis also has strong archive material from a occupied country in »Milisuthando«; Like Aljafari, she also drives the ambition to give the material a personal impact. But the political background of the film – the Homeland Transkei in South Africa of Apartheid – looks more interesting than the experience of racism, which the filmmaker unfortunately shares with great many.

Like Vögele and Dumesh, but not impressionistic, but highly systematic, Marcin Wierzchowski puts together a collective drama from many individual voices in “The German People”. It is about the murders of Hanau 2020. The members of the victims turn out to be admirable and clever, they also have combative and clever supporters, such as the Forensic Architecture agency, but you don’t have to look into the coalition agreement of the upcoming government to view that the protest against a sometimes openly racially acting police was almost unglorent.

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Nationalism and militarism march forward with roar. Two diary films by Heinz Emigholz were therefore hard to beat in terms of topicality. In »NYC, October 10, 2022« he presents a magnificent monologue of the draftsman Art Spiegelman (»Maus«) about the power of art and comic, racist stereotypes. And in »Innsbruck, March 6, 2023«, Emigholz subtly reflects the commodity of war: In a hotel room, Karl Kraus’s reading of his »Reclamic trips to Hell« (1921) about Swiss tourists in Verdun runs out of the window and starts with containers of the logistics company Raben. This is a coincidence, because in Kraus’ “last days of mankind” (1922) the raven -like ravens are war winners: “Hunger has never tormented us,/since we have followed your armies.”

In a noise like that of our time, the inconspicuous is utopian. Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré accompany a paleobotanist in his walk through Normandy in “7 Walks with Mark Brown”. Again and again he screams of rapture when he encountered plants as if it were long missing. For him, the Bible should be rewritten: “And everything is grass, that’s like meat.” The past of domestic plants goes back to millions of years, but its future is as insecure as ours. And it is not just the technology of war technology questions the human.

In the moving short film “The Voice of the Engineer”, André Sieger records the effort of his father, the sound of his voice, which he will lose due to an illness, with electronic help. Since the father has already delegated a lot of devices, a helper asks him if he couldn’t modest himself with any language robot. The father proudly answers that intonation is also part of his personality. But what will be reliable in our personality in a few years? And couldn’t the present article have also been written by a AI? Many certainties will be shaken in this area – material for the next few years.