Film Festival: Dokfilmwoche Hamburg: About revolutionary patience

Every year that capitalism allows, the Dokfilmwoche Hamburg asks the right questions of the time. Consequently, the 21st edition, which ended on Sunday, was, among other things, about so-called artificial intelligence (AI). Viera Čákanyová’s science fiction documentary “Notes from Eremocene” takes a look from the machine future to our human present. The “Eremocene” of the title is the era of loneliness: Homo sapiens is alone on earth after the demise of other living beings, but is already in the hands of a superior, immortal AI. But his look back at what seemed natural and spontaneous to him shows that – whether it is Christmas parties, beach fun or hunting – it has long been reified and emptied.

The filmmakers Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse and Quentin L’helgoualc’h also ventured into the skull of AI with “Knit’s Island”. The island referred to in the title of her film is the virtual landscape of the computer game “DayZ”. We hike through a kind of Chernobyl after the disaster. As in Philip K. Dick’s novel “Dr. Bloodmoney”, a new society is formed after the catastrophe, which consists of the avatars of the players scattered all over the world: crazy people who “enjoy murdering”, newly religious people who serve a wolf god, but also peaceful hippies, who invite the filmmakers to visit as long as they don’t shoot any animals. “We only shoot a movie,” is the team’s quick-witted answer.

The eerie thing about such dystopian scenarios is that they remind us fatally of the one in which we are condemned to live. Whether Olena Newkryta reflects on the automation of the working world in her strict and dream-like etude “Patterns Against Workers” or Claire Simon observes everyday life in a gynecological clinic in “Notre corps” (Our Body), we find ourselves in a machine park here and there have the embarrassing feeling that they have not yet become fully machine.

If the mechanization of humanity is one major issue of our time, the other, arguably even greater, issue is migration. Two aspects characterize the contributions to the topic: resistance and history – especially the history of resistance. In “Xaraasi Xanne – Crossing Voices” Raphaël Grisey connects both aspects in an associative, circular, even hypnotic way. He draws on the image archive of the recently deceased activist Bouba Touré and supplements it with spectacular finds from French image and video collections. Touré had accompanied the immigrant and sans-papiers movement since the 1960s, was a faithful chronicler of their resistance and went to Mali in 1977 to found an agricultural cooperative there – as an autonomous project, not as a project subsidized by the former colonial state. Touré constantly repeats his formula: “Life is struggle, life is struggle…”

Closely linked to the major issue of migration is racism, which even affects people who immigrated many generations ago. Just think of the antigypsyism that is rooted throughout Europe. After Peter Nestler’s and Rainer Komers’ pioneering films on the situation and art of the Sinti and Roma were shown in Hamburg in recent years, the festival opened this year with Karin Berger’s half-hour portrait of Karl Stojka. Berger has already made a great contribution to one of the great artists of our time, Ceija Stojka, Karl’s sister. There isn’t much of Karl’s art to be seen in Berger’s latest film “Wankostättn”, but it does tell us about the Sinti and Roma’s former parking lot in Vienna (the Wankostättn), about the death march of the concentration camp prisoners and about revenge against SS henchmen. Stojka’s charisma, the elegant choreography of protagonist and camera and the well-thought-out editing make this film a unique masterpiece.

The enormous variety of media on offer at the festival was astonishing. Not only the above-mentioned science fiction by Čákanyová, but also Ann Carolin Renninger’s natural-philosophical capriccio “The Wind Takes Them Away” uses Super 8 and 16 mm material, while Faraz Fesharaki uses it for his poetic family portrait “What did you dream yesterday?” “, Parajanov?” almost always to blurry images from video conferences. In “Operation Namibia” Martin Paret tells a tragically failed anti-apartheid campaign as an illustrated epistolary novel and Franzis Kabisch had the brilliant idea of ​​developing her film “getty abortions” from the stock or symbolic photos that magazines use to illustrate their articles about abortion .

The fact that Dokfilmwoche presented radio features this year is not as absurd as it might sound. After all, one of the greatest works of European cinema, “Branca de Neve” (Snow White; 2000) by João César Monteiro, is more or less a radio play. And the Lettrists already knew that cinema can serve not only as a screening place, but also, and above all, as a place for meetings and discussions. So why not listen to something together in the cinema and talk about it? Here, too, a huge turn has been made historically. Because what a difference between Klaus Wildenhahn’s “Where the chimneys are smoking, you have to go there later” (1978) and the recently broadcast “Fifty Shades of Meryem” by Leon Daniel and Yannick Kaftan! The first feature is a linear, biased but dry portrait of ordinary people, namely workers, the second is a mosaic of an unusual one, namely the actress Meryem Öz. The feature has become increasingly subjective and fine-grained over the decades, but when it works well, it doesn’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

A fundamental idea of ​​the festival was that political activism can only benefit from knowing its own history. Classic films about Spanish fighters such as “Unforgiving Memories” (1979) or “The Cousins” (1988) remind us that the German left was also once proletarian. And Re Karen’s restored portrait of the singer-songwriter Fasia Jansen (“Of Defiant Women and a Troubadora”; 1987) shows that much that was once achieved intellectually and organizationally has now been lost – I just name anti-militarism.

The left is surrendering to power too soon. This is also why a Nigerian activist says in “Coconut Head Generation” by Alain Kananda that the number one rule of resistance is patience. It is the experience that the Palestinian activist Basel Adra conveys to his fellow Israeli fighter Yuval Abraham in “No Other Land”: Some battles drag on over many decades. It is not said that one day they will be rewarded, but whoever gives up on them gives up on themselves.