Film programmes in Halle

The film program of the Werkleitz Festival 2023 includes a film room as part of the exhibition in Wiederstedt and a three-part film series at the Zazie Kino in Halle. The films, which are curated by Florian Wüst, look beyond the Mansfeld region to explore the history and the current state of mining economy.

From northern Europe to South America, the exploitation of deep layers of the earth bears witness to the violence of colonial land seizure, displacement, and environmental destruction. Mineral resources are the material basis of modern life as we know it, and this way of life is finally reaching its limits against the backdrop of social inequality, energy crisis, climate change, and species extinction. The four short films by Mareike Bernien & Alex Gerbaulet, Andreas Bunte, Ilaria Di Carlo, and Armin Thalhammer presented at the Inspektorhaus dissect space and time, set labor and technology, landscape and environment in relation to each other: the geological and narrative sediments of the Ore Mountains as a radiant legacy of the nuclear age, the artificial production of diamonds as a physical miracle and an attempt to find a way out of geopolitical dependencies, the bizarre open-pit mines and power plant landscapes of the East and West German coal industry as incomprehensible memorials of an industrialized nature, and the silver mining in Bolivia’s Potosí as the epitome of the centuries-old exploitation of indigenous labor.