Filmprogramm

The idea for a film programme for the Werkleitz Festival 2022 arose in cooperation with the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival. Werkleitz has enjoyed a decades-long friendship and collaboration with this festival and, in particular, with its director Gerhard Wissner. The programme he curated for Mehr oder Weniger includes Florian Kunert's film Fortschritt im Tal der Ahnungslosen (Progress in the Valley of the Clueless), which will be shown at the opening of the festival. The film is set in the ruins of the former state-owned combine ‘Fortschritt’. In the 1980s, it was the largest manufacturer of agricultural machinery in the GDR, with around 70,000 employees, and also exported its products to Syria at that time. In a successful mixture of staging and documentation, asylum seekers from Syria meet former factory workers here a good 40 years later. Subtle but also humorous, this encounter forms the backdrop for a reinterpretation of German-Syrian ‘friendship’ and the different realities of decline and reorientation. By overcoming the well-trodden paths of attribution and prejudice, the film provides food for thought for a discussion about how people can come together and live.

Gerhard Wissner's short film programme Nothing Lasts Forever deals with temporality, on the one hand linked to the upheavals of recent German history, and on the other hand to the infinitely long and invisible presence of radiation as a result of uranium mining in Wismut. And ultimately, based on the closure of a fast food restaurant in Herne, the question arises: what comes next? What comes after mining, what comes after humans, what comes after permanence?

The second short film programme is curated by Maria Morata, who is a member and curator of the short film selection committee associated with the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival. Her short film programme Fragt die Steine (Ask the Stones) presents various regions of the world affected by mining, revealing connections between our digital lives (displays and processors) and the conditions under which the materials needed for this are extracted. Criticism of the exploitation of the earth and its people, as well as of the displacement and destruction caused by mining, becomes clear.