50th Duisburg Film Week: Supervised viewing as a method of knowledge

The Duisburg Film Week took place for the 50th time this year. In addition to the regular festival program, which, as always, presented a selection of around 20 films from German-speaking countries, there were a few special events to mark the occasion.

The most lasting was probably the presentation of an anthology entitled “Working for the Cinema”, which collected memories and reflections on 50 years of festivals on almost 500 pages. The volume not only revealed a variety of subject areas and thematic lines, but also the diverse environment that has always characterized the Duisburg Film Week.

Like hardly any other festival in Duisburg, it thrives on the fact that people travel there from further distances year after year and mingle with an audience that comes from the area. This year there seems to have been a whole wave of new visitors to the festival. An unusually large number of screenings were unusually full and some films had to be transferred to additional rooms.

The Duisburg Film Week is a place of traditions and innovations. One of the innovations is that since last year, two people from the festival's environment have taken a closer look at a topic with a selection of film excerpts. Supervised viewing as a method of knowledge.

On the one hand, the traditions include the basic process - everyone watches a film, then everyone talks about this film and at the very end there is a protocol that records the basic lines and some statements of the discussion. This process and the basic attitude of taking talking and exchanging about film as important as watching the films is the unchanged core of the festival over all 50 years.

But there are also smaller, newer traditions. The piece “Excitement about Hybrid Forms” is performed once every year. The process goes something like this: A film that formally looks more like a feature film than a documentary is shown as part of the film week. Afterwards, the combined documentary expertise that makes up the audience at Film Week sits in the discussion room and tries to understand why they should see this film. A director sits on the podium and doesn't understand where the excitement comes from and what is happening to the film.

This year, this performance was based on Julian Rabus' film “Sunstrokes,” which lets young people play teenagers. Rabus came up with an arrangement for his film that would give the young actors space to explore “the potential of reality”.

For his “hybrid slacker film,” Rabus draws on further attempts to draw boundaries and positions in the documentary-fiction dichotomy, “sometimes a picture does not have to depict reality, but it is enough to know that it could be reality,” as the minutes of the discussion note. This year's discussion about hybrid forms was comparatively lively compared to previous years. This time too, one couldn't completely avoid the impression that people were communicating past each other.

This year the films again represented a wide range of forms. In his film “Estahbes,” made at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts, Almourad Aldeeb memorialized his friends who died in Syrian torture prisons. At the end of 2013, Aldeeb and a friend were taken to prison after celebrating a birthday in Damascus. A little later, seven more friends follow.

After Assad's fall, two are still alive. Aldeeb's film was largely shot in the very place where he and his friends were held prisoner. Aldeeb reconstructs his experiences into barren images of the rooms. At the end he visits the families of the dead with other surviving friends. The living rooms are empty. Aldeeb received the North Rhine-Westphalia State Young Talent Award for his impressive film.

In her film “The 49th Year,” the Austrian artist Heidrun Holzfeind portrays the militant activist Toshihiko Kamata, who has been imprisoned in Japan since 1980 following a series of bombings carried out by the Schwarzhelm Group starting in 1971. The most famous attack was on a Christmas tree next to a police guard box in Tokyo. The bomb seriously injured the police officer and several passers-by. Holzfeind's film looks for clues based on Kamata's letters from prison. The film was awarded the 3sat Documentary Film Prize.

Philipp Hartmann contributed the beautiful and intimate half-hour documentary “On the Back of the Landscape” to this year’s festival. Hartmann visits his former film professor while he is waiting in a parking lot for his partner, who teaches art at a local school. Six hours every day. Hartmann's film won the City of Duisburg Prize.

After the Golden Dove at the documentary film festival in Leipzig and the audience award at the Viennale in Duisburg, “Transition” by Peter Badel and Chris Wright was rightly honored again and received the Arte Documentary Film Prize two weeks before its theatrical release. This year too, you didn't have to agree with all of the speeches in order to still appreciate the discussions as a whole as a reflection on documentary work. The 50th Duisburg Film Week was lively, well attended and wordy as always.