THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY (Opening Program)

In the organizer's words:

I was a stranger
Lado Pavlik, Fritz Fischer, BRD 1970, 5 min. no dialog, 16mm

Farewell
Želimir Žilnik, FRG 1975, 9 min. German with English subtitles, digital file

They serve Allah and the Germans
Michael Brückner and Peter Heller, FRG 1973, 25 min. German with English live-translation, 16mm

18 minutes of civil courage
Rahim Shirmahd, Germany 1991, 18 min. German with English subtitles, digital file

Asylum
Friedrich Klütsch, BRD 1984, 17 min, German with English live-translation, 16mm

Followed by a conversation with Aurora Rodonò and Ömer Alkin

The event will be held in German with simultaneous translation into English

THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY opens with a program showcasing selected films from the SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA collection. Ich war fremd and Sie dienen Allah und den Deutschen are two films discovered in 2021 during research for a film series on labor migration, found in the archive of DOMiD in Cologne. Abschied was also unexpectedly uncovered there - a film depicting the final minutes of a Yugoslav guest worker at Munich station before his departure, long thought lost by its director Želimir Žilnik. Asyl and 18 Minuten Zivilcourage shed light on narratives of asylum seekers in Germany through different cinematic approaches. A conversation with film scholar Ömer Alkin and migration history curator Aurora Rodonò will follow, discussing positionalities in front of and behind the camera, as well as critical questions around archival practices and film heritage.

Aurora Rodonò is an author, mediator, and curator for migration history at the Stadtmuseum Berlin.

Ömer Alkin is a media and cultural scholar whose research focuses on aesthetics, migration, racism, and audiovisual culture and education. His study Die visuelle Kultur der Migration (The Visual Culture of Migration) was published in 2019.

SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
Lindowerstr. 20/22
House C
13347 Berlin

Directions
U6 S + U Wedding
S41, S42
Bus: 120, 147, N6, N20.