For fifteen years now, Eberswalde has had a film festival. It all started in the old Passage Cinema many of us used to know as a working movie theatre when we were kids. Now the Paul Wunderlich Haus has been hosting the festival for many years. We feel comfortable there, we’re at the right place. This year’s poster exhibition in the entrance area recalls all the changes to the festival which took place over the years, and it’s obvious at first glance that a lot has changed.
Now that the festival week is getting closer, we are looking forward to the films, the audience, the events in the festival club and the discussions. All these things taken together make the Provinziale one of the most exciting processes our team-mates experience in the course of their working year. Turning an administrative building into a festival venue is fun every time we do it. We have enough visitors and visiting filmmakers, and there are many interesting encounters between them during the festival week. The festival’s recognition is extending to the national level. This year, we were even invited to the President’s reception on New Year’s Eve. Special formats such as the Heimatfenster, the Gateway to the Province or the Farmers’ Film Night have proved to work out well and go on improving every year. And more and more, the films are getting closer to the core of the issue we set out to examine: how places become actors in the play of human life. Because the places where people live and the ideas they have about those places do matter.
In the meantime, we’ve become aware that this also applies to our own, organisational work. We live in a prospering region which has enough resources to support us, financially and otherwise. Our funding partners and sponsors have never curbed our freedom to choose our own programmes. We want to go on making use of that freedom to make the Provinziale look at things and places less enjoyable. It is one of the strange inconsistencies in life that a festival like this can still be a lot of fun.
Kenneth Anders