FESTIVAL CLUB 2018

The Festival Club opens daily, half an hour before the first screening. Here’s where you can meet, discuss films and enjoy our special late-night shows featuring spirits, butterflies, farmers and the blues. The doors are open, and you didn’t want to go home anyway, did you? There will be concerts and performances, a bar and a lot of fun.

Jörg Schneider (voc, git) – Andreas Schwaiger (drums)

Beautiful blues. Songs full of depressive killers, homeless philosophers, husbands addicted to betting, mysterious tenants upstairs and arsonist beggars. And love, of course, the full panoply. In addition to their own songs, Jörg Schneider and Andreas Schwaiger will bring a fair amount of Delta blues with them, from protagonists such as Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton and Blind Blake: folk music’s unpretentious beauty mixed with the hypnotic power of blues.
www.schneider-schwarznau.de

Wilhelm Bartsch, born 1950 in Eberswalde, has been living in Halle/Saale since 1976. Now he’s coming back to read from his ‘Eberswalde’ novel.

A cattle breeder with a university entrance diploma, Wilhelm Bartsch studied philosophy and worked as a proofreader, rotation worker, dramaturg, childcare worker, post-office clerk and night watchman. His 1986 literary debut, ‘Übungen im Joch’ (Exercises in the Yoke) gained him immediate recognition as a poet in both parts of Germany. In 1987, he was awarded the Grimm Brothers Prize of the city of Hanau for it. He went on to write more poetry and prose but also worked as a publisher and, in various roles, for theatres, radio and film. He is a member of PEN and the Saxon Academy of Arts.

Eberswalde in 1965, a quiet, small town near Berlin. That’s where 14-year-old Franz Florschütz lives, together with his younger brother Keule and his uncaring mother. He seeks his fortune with girls and, together with his sidekick Erwin Hagedorn, gets involved in the cheap novelette market. To make matters worse, the Stasi secret service get their hands around his neck. In June 1969, Winne and Shattie, the dealers’ messenger boys, disappear suddenly. A drama beyond imagination is going to unfold.

“Bartsch’s novel isn’t mainly about a bloodthirsty murderer, but having that element in the plot lends a sinister undertone to his precisely and subtly recounted story of an adolescent’s life in the East German province.” (Jürgen Engler, Weimarer Beiträge)

“It seems that there hasn’t been any prose since ‘The New Sorrows of Young W.’ that would have described young people’s attitude to life in East Germany as vividly as Plenzdorf’s novel did in its day. Now Wilhelm Bartsch’s “Das bisschen Zeug zur Ewigkeit” has achieved exactly that. Bartsch is an outstanding poet, essayist and storyteller, grossly underestimated in the western part of Germany. His new novel gives a milieu depiction of a quality which is hard to find elsewhere.” (Karl Corino)
www.poetenladen.de/wilhelm-bartsch.htm

Europe’s violent colonial past and its consequences – a montage.
(Idea / script / direction: Paul Plamper, 106 min)

“Dienstbare Geister” tells a story of two migration flows taking place in opposite directions: In 1905, a destitute young woman leaves Berlin to emigrate to the German colony of Cameroon. Her social advancement comes at the expense of her local neighbours and servants, who are putting up a dogged but futile resistance against the Germans – against land grabbing, forced labour and whipping.

In 2015, a young man from Cameroon sets out for Germany because he can’t see any alternatives to living in rich Europe. Persistently exploiting himself, he finally gets a steady job in Berlin but, little by little, loses touch with his former homeland. Then one day, his boss wants him to do her a favour by taking on a task in Cameroon – against his will.

Like a poltergeist, the colonial era penetrates our present time. Then again, even in colonial times, we can hear harbingers of a future not unlike the world we know today.

Paul Plamper’s work was awarded the Deutscher Hörbuchpreis (German Audiobook Prize) in 2018.
www.hoerspielpark.de/website/titel/dienstbare-geister

A writer and a musician are reading and singing Rikscha and other blues tunes, each on his own and both together. They hardly need more than two voices, a guitar and a keyboard. A concert-reading event.
www.falko-hennig.de

Films from Antje Schiffers’s I love being a farmer and I always will archive.
www.antjeschiffers.de

Karl Neukauf (piano, voc) – Hans Rohe (git, voc) – Heike Becker (bass, voc) – Ilka Possin (perc, voc)

A somewhat different kind of Rolling Stones cover band. On occasion of their idols’ 50th stage anniversary in 2013, The Butterflies paid tribute with a variegated, inventive and musically challenging programme of their own. We will hear old treasures and some less known pieces penned by Jagger & Richards. Old splendour in a new guise, with an accent on the more ballad-like items.
https://hansrohe.wordpress.com/butterfly-on-a-wheel/

DJ Illvibe (turntable) – Berger (git) – Beat (bass) – Based (drums)

What do Based, drummer with Seeed, Beat, bass player with Marsimoto and Marteria, and Berger & Illvibe of the Krauts have in common? Right, they won’t hurt you, they just want to play. Lychee Lassi, the band they founded in steaming late-90s Berlin, has hurled itself away from the city’s basement clubs, via Algeria and India, into orbits where the human ear must fail. But now they’re coming back to the Berlin underground scene, as a band named BASED 4. They might have been chastened, who knows. In any case, they accept neither fixed plans nor musical constraints – just a real-time, live band.
www.halberschmidt.org/
www.thekrauts.fm

Live: Csókolom

Csókolom revive Transsilvania’s age-old music, with their violin sounds as passionate and nonconformist as the Romany music the band mainly draws on. For all their love of freedom, they have come to obey a couple of self-imposed rules: Know your sources, respect them and be aware exactly how to treat them right.

Still, tradition is not an impenetrable border to the group. Their three CDs, published by the legendary US label Arhoolie, testify to their excellent stylistic taste as well as a whiff of musical buccaneerism. What sounds like the swinging accompaniment to a Transsylvanian village dance night when you first hear it will soon reveal the stowaways hidden inside the music: jazz cadences, a genial Parisian musette, a precisely timed Latin riff.

As Anti von Klewitz says: “Once you’ve become immersed in traditional music and its performance practice, you will be allowed to let go of the original. Deem yourself lucky if you have the chance to play with musicians who know their way around a lot of styles and how to perform them and who are true masters of their instruments. That, together with the curiosity, passion and intuition every member of the band must have, is the ideal basis for arrangements that allow you to sound the most secret depths of this music.”

“…For all the reverence they pay to the past, Csókolom can also be said to make contemporary world music… at their best of times, it seems that Bartok himself guided their hands when they wrote their arrangements.” (Frankfurter Rundschau)
www.csokolom.com

Festival Club Programme by Udo Muszynski Konzerte + Veranstaltungen
Equipment: Tim Altrichter (oton)
Bar: Katia Ziebarth / Till Kirchner
www.mescal.de
www.facebook.com/provinzialefestivalclub