completed FILMS
[100 min. / 2023 / Martha Mechow / SUPERZOOM Film]
Festivals:
FID Marseille 2023 – International Competition
Viennale 2023
DocLisboa 2023
Mar del Plata 2023 – Festival Internacional de Cine
New Horizons International Filmfestival 2023
UNDERDOX 2023 – internationales filmfestival. dokument und experiment
Short Synopsis:
In a dark living room, a young woman sinks into the sofa. By saying: „I wish I was a carpet, then I would never have to get up“ she bids farewell to her domestic duties and leaves her two children Flippa and Furia. It is trough the diary of the now teenage Flippa that we learn of this incident. In Martha Mechow’s experimental debut film, the then 23 year old paints pictures with words that rhyme, soliloquize, or improvise on the event. Crossed in love Flippa, writes to her mother inbetween colourful drawings. Calls it „the heterosexual knot“, that unites them in their misfortune and which led the big sister to join the crooked mother-child-resort „Barranconi“. A place, where pregnant bellies become Trojan Horses and two young men the undoing of all. „Die ängstliche Verkehrsteilnehmerin“ tells, as detailed as can be in 720×576 pixels, of the pain of a protagonist who loves what love can not save. -> more
[71 min. / 2023 / Hans Broich / SUPERZOOM Film]
Festivals:
Diagonale 23 * award for best artistic montage
Ji.hlava International Documentary Filmfestival
Short Synopsis:
Minuet is a documentary adaptation based on the eponymous novel by the well-known Flemish author Louis Paul Boon.
A man, his wife and their much younger housemaid tell us about themselves and their relationships to each other, which are characterized by mutual, furtive observation and glances.
Within the iconography of this patriarchal triptych, the film’s characters grapple with their own subjective narratives and over their interpretation of the film’s recurring images. Between re-enactment and reproduction, the film and the novel’s brutal language do not even spare the director’s own private life, in turn raising the question: which of the recounted moral violations is conserved within his own four, heteronormative walls? Minuet is the terse story of an ordinary act of violence – the power to interpret a reality. -> more
[96 min. / 2021 / Hans Broich / SUPERZOOM Film]
Festivals:
Diagonale 2021
Internationale Hofer Filmtage
Goethe Institut Seattle GERMAN FILM NOW / Northwest Film Forum
Short Synopsis:
A bar full of people talking about Volker Spengler. HIGHFALUTIN is an attempt to create such a utopia, a simple „what if.“
Besides working in New York with experimental filmmaker Jack Smith, Spengler collaborated with many of the most important figures in post-war German film and theater: from Fassbinder to Schlingensief as well as Fritz Kortner and Heiner Müller. While rehearsing with the talented young actor, Kortner summed up his anarchic talent best: „Spengler, you are the downfall of Western civilization.“
World famous at least since his role as the transsexual Elvira Weishaupt in Fassbinder’s IN A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS, Volker Spengler is the impetus behind but not the only subject of this little documentary-cum-chamber play set in his favorite West Berlin bar and second home, Diener Tattersall. A wide array of friends gather to discuss the sometimes indistinguishable legends and facts. Avoiding causal connections and the trappings of a typical „bio pic,“ it is an attempt to do justice to our friend Volker—“walking social criticism“ as Klaus Emmerich affectionately called him— through collective narration. A family gathering that definitely never took place this way.
Because Volker Spengler doesn’t fit into any joke, anecdote, or film. Even this one. -> more
in PRODUCTION
BLEIFREI-95
[Emma Hütt & Tina Muffler / feature-length / in pre-production]
For the film BLEIFREI-95, the directing duo Emma Hütt & Tina Muffler relocate the world-famous and self-proclaimed oldest lesbian bar in Germany, La Gata, by means of montage from Frankfurt am Main to the concrete desert of a motor court. The Autohof, as a microcosm of car parks, gas stations, motels, car washes, drive-ins and toilets classically dominated by men, is subverted in BLEIFREI-95 by the lesbian-queer community. As a non-place/place of passage, it becomes the starting point for an imagined queer space. In this fictional utopia in the midst of dreary reality, between the motorway and provincial villages, the friends Zuza, Toni and Lolly spent their youth. Somewhere in the homophobic nowhere, the three protagonists have had their first experiences and have become family to each other as friends.
Toni successfully establishes and practices lesbian cruising, a cultural practice for anyonymised sex previously reserved for gay men.
The three girlfriends demonstrate to each other in a late adolescent frenzy through the places of the Autohof that their friendship is not only the transition to the final station of bourgeois nuclear family happiness.
A film about the difficulty of having relationships that include fear of loss, belligerence, jealousy, falling in love and sexual attraction. And about the attempt to overcome the compulsion to always be the flawless alternative. It’s about women* who are always too: too pretty, too loud, too energetic, too sensitive, too ugly, too arrogant, too self-confident, too insecure, too offensive.
Das dreiblättrige Kleeblatt (AT)
[Martha Mechow / feature-length / in development]
A mysterious young woman who speaks only a foreign language appears in the English village of Almondsbury in 1817. By constantly challenging contemporary expectations and being linguistically elusive, she quickly causes great controversy. In the context of the rising Orientalism, she is taken in by the Worrall family and mistaken for a foreign princess. All of England begins to participate in the exoticization of the stranger, who tries to push the boundaries of the imaginable of her time out of necessity.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
[Hans Broich & Felix Leitner / feature-length / in production]
Fiction differs from everyday experience not in that it has less, but more rationality. The documentary film indistinct chatter (AT) explores the relation between everyday experience and fiction through the montage of many subjective holiday shots on the beach of Lido di Venezia. Our protagonists document their beach holidays with their respective demands and prejudices during the high season and describe themselves by means of what they film, how they film and in what way they influence what is filmed. The beach as a fleeting, condensed and diverse micro-society that reconstitutes itself and dissolves again daily over the course of the day becomes a starry sky under which each person recognises what they have learned to recognise. Thousands of people from different cultures, classes and ages gather here to bathe and waste their time, structured by nothing but the course of the sun. The beach marks the border between land and sea, between one nation and another. It represents the common ground where collective national possessions, memory and identity are publicly displayed; a place of pleasure, leisure and pride. Anthropologist Michael Taussig describes the beach as a place of fantasy production, a playground where transgressions and pleasures take place.
indistinct chatter is a montage of countless documentary holiday shots on the beach of Lido di Venezia. Dozens of small, constructed images of the world show our protagonists‘ search for an illusion they can live with
DADDY, KOMPLEX
[Mireya Heider de Jahnsen / short film / financing]
The German-Greek sisters PINA (24) and OLA (28) are spending their holidays in Greece. The ferry sets off, Pina waves to strangers, Ola eats ice cream, you know, holidays, and the ship pushes through the Mediterranean to the next island. Ola waits until they are on the open sea to reveal the real agenda to her sister. The two sisters Pina and Ola test the limits of their inseparability on their „father complex“ on a ferry in the Greek Mediterranean.