PROGRAMME ADVISORY BOARDS

Justice is a tedious business

A note on our selection of films for the 2022 Long Documentary competition

Looking at the people who populate this year‘s documentaries, one is confident that they, living all together on this planet, act to the best of their ability.

In Peru (Vida Férrea), they extract ore from the mountains and carry it down to the towns – hard work indeed whose usefulness cannot be denied.

On the Amazon River, boatmen deliver goods to the people standing by the riverbanks and longing for the vital supplies to come (Veins of the Amazon).

In Vietnam, young farmers whose days are filled with purpose go into the wilderness for a while (Pa va Héng) to experience themselves and nature from a different perspective.

On the Japanese island of Yonagumi, people raise their children with love and care as you would expect, although the kids will probably leave the island as soon as they have finished school.

Things are less secure and orderly in the Moroccan desert where, with a lot of effort and against much resistance, a school is yet to be built (School of Hope). But love and reason are also at work here.

Looking back on the year 1989 in Frankfurt (Oder), young people and contemporary witnesses do a clever job of retrospection (At the Coffee Table with Stasi) and learn that democracy is not possible without critical self-examination.

Life in The Great Basin of Nevada is one of daily chores and a tenacious struggle for autonomy and dignity in a world that makes exactly that very difficult.

In Valdeluz, a failed planned town in Spain, life hardly seems meaningful and sensible now (Barataria), and yet one can see how the residents are trying tro make the best of their circumstances.

All of the films expose the conditions under which we live, whether in poverty or wealth, in dignity or in bondage, as reflected critically in particular in the Argentinian production
La conquista de las ruinas.

When we follow those people and their unfolding stories, we can certainly find something like hope. Because they all take their lives seriously. If there is anything bad about the situation on this planet which we are sharing in increasing consciousness, it is that our legitimate demands on society and nature are not well balanced against our own contributions to a life in unity. Burdens are not well distributed, there is not always room for love, consideration is often not well received.

These issues relate to justice, not as a question of financial provision, but as one of human coexistence. Do they still play a role in our major discourses about global crisis and saving the world?

Dokumentarfilm Programm Beirat
Kenneth Anders, Sven Wallrath, Gregor Glass

When looking at the Short Documentary submissions to this year‘s Provinziale, two themes caught our eyes in particular: family and working life. They are spread out across the whole week of screenings.

We will open with Ann‘s Pub because this film brings together both of them. Through her work, bar owner Ann creates a large family of guests. On Wednesday evening, the filmmakers will be guests themselves in our festival shed.

Three films approach the topic of family with very different methods and and from very different angles. In The Traditional Brazilian Family KATU, family means the community of an indigenous people in northeastern Brazil. Fati’s choice takes the perspective of a mother of five in Ghana. Confronted with surprising judgments from her fellow people on her return from Europe, she tries to reunite her children as a family. My Neighbour, Death portrays a family in Iran who live next to a cemetery and whose father works there as a gravedigger.

Five films might be tagged working life in particular: Martin Trautmann, Symphony of the Knots, 1 Kilo – 3 Euro, You Can’t Automate Me and Black Wagon.
Manufacturing and the service industry, workplace safety and high physical effort – these things ubiquitous all over the world are impressively pictured here.

Two more films are also part of this year’s Short Documentary programme. Murmur is a successful experimental approach to our everyday modes of perception. The Mountains Sing takes us to China and gives insight into an unusual form of communication.

All entries have been nominated for the coveted Audience Award. We are always available to talk about our selection. The decision on who gets the award is up to you.

Short Documentary Programme Advisory Board
Thomas Winkelkotte, Sven Ahlhelm, Julia Hebestreit

Your work or your life?

Our programme for this year revolves around work. It has always played an important role in the short feature films we sent to the competitions in recent years, but this time it seems to be even more prominent.

Be it wage labour or entrepreneurial initiative, physical or intellectual effort, taking place on a field, in a forest, by the sea, in a factory, an office or an independent business, be it of the kind that can only be found elsewhere or is endangered in its tradition of craftsmanship, you name it – work creates ties and takes us into the world and to the places where we live or want to live. This is true for any one of us as well as for society as a whole, both productively and destructively. They say that everyone is the architect of their own fortune, but it‘s easy to see that this platitude is untrue: because even though we have to work hard to lead a fulfilling life, happiness is nothing a person can seek for themselves. It is something we can only experience in company, and the films shown at the Provinziale testify to that.

What will a butcher do in a vegan world, or an auto mechanic in the near future? Can a young baker in the city afford a life among those she makes bread for from her income? Are farm holidays the last straw for small farmers? If your life has been rooted in the country soil so far, will you really find a future in the city where the employment offers are? Can you make a family happy if paid work is scarce and even the clams in the sea are private property? Competition or solidarity, which is more important?
In the face of global, national and regional crises and social fault lines, will we still find time to think about the utopian potential of work as a non-alienating occupation that challenges and advances human beings as a whole? It seems unrealistic but would be badly needed because it is work as a social activity that shapes us and the world we live in both on the large and the small scale – whether on a Spanish farm, by the Italian seashore, in Cambodia or Kazakhstan or on a French country road.

How can work and life be in harmony? The thirteen films which Katja Ziebarth, Sascha Leeske and I have selected from 467 submissions for the 18th Provinziale won‘t give an answer, but they will ask the question, and that is what matters.

Lars Fischer on behalf of the Short Feature Film Programme Board

Short Feature Film Programme Advisory Board
Sascha Leeske, Katja Ziebarth, Lars Fischer

Nearly a hundred submissions from all over the world reached us in the Animated Film category this year. Obviously, many artists used the lockdown period productively to capture their ideas and stories in drawings, modeling clay, collages and computer pixels. And we don’t promise too much in saying that this is a good year. What surprised us was that not a single production dealt with the paramount topic of the past two years, the pandemic. Instead, the works reflect the entire variety of human existence in the province, inside and outside. We define these terms broadly, as the animation category offers a particularly large amount of creative freedom.

An examplary submission to illustrate this comes from Estonia, is called “Taaskohtumine” and documents the history of the island of Ruhnu and its inhabitants through animated items of flotsam and jetsam.
The film “Confusion Will Be My Epithaph” also chooses an unconventional visual language, showing animated metal characters. Just as impressive, albeit using different stylistic devices, are “The Better Angels” (Australia) and “Les larmes de la Seine” (France), two film that reveal poetic and magical moments even in times of greatest despair. As it is, French films are prominently represented in the Animated Film category this year, also comprising “Metallo”, the inner journey of a miner, and the beautifully animated integration drama “Un caillou dans la chaussure”. Also on our programme are two films from Russia in our program, “Fishwoman” and “Oh, Whose Is The Rye”, which both show how old, folkloric stories can be rethought and brought up to date. In “Loop” and “Emmen am See”, filmmakers from Spain and Switzerland deal with the absurdities of our standardised world and show unconventional ways of escaping it.

Food for thought to foster deeper understanding, fresh inspiration and, of course, a brief escape from the daily grind – this year’s animated film programme has it all in store for you, we hope. Have fun and enjoy the films.

Animated Film Programme Advisory Board
Florian Wolf, Kathrin Welke, Almut Undis, Dominik Zwicky