Berlin Documentary Forum 3
May 29–June 1, 2014
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin
This third edition of Berlin Documentary Forum investigates the production of documentary narratives and the role such narratives play in the fabrication of social reality and lived experience. If, as Jacques Rancière argues, the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought, then the contributions to Berlin Documentary Forum 3 demonstrate the extent to which this process is a rich site of artistic creation and critical inquiry.
Please join us for a four-day program of unique live presentations, performances, screenings, events for kids, and installations by artists Smadar Dreyfus and Harun Farocki, with live DJ sets each night of the festival at 11pm.
Single-event tickets and day tickets are available: hkw.de/tickets. Limited availability.
Berlin Documentary Forum 3: new practices across disciplines
With its fragmentary structure that mixes media formats and discursive registers, the new theater play by director Rabih Mroué, Riding on a Cloud, tackles the vicissitudes of constructing truth, particularly in the aftermath of conflict and trauma. Thursday, 29 May, 6pm & 8:30pm
Providing a glimpse into the history of documentary cinema in Germany during the division of the country into East and West, the film program Deutsche Bilder (German Images) explores conceptions of femininity witnessed by two generations of young women from East and West Germany, as well as the relationship between industrial production and social organization in the two Germanys. Mädchen mit Zwanzig (Girls at Twenty), Thursday, 29 May, 8:30pm, Turbine, Sunday, 1 June, 2pm
Doppelgänger is a screening and talk by filmmaker Basma Alsharif exploring the phenomenon of bilocation—the state of being in multiple places at the same time—through film history, artistic practice, the Palestinian perspective, and autohypnosis. Friday, 30 May, 6pm
Documenting how a single event may live a thousand lives through the act of telling, the Tōhoku Trilogy from filmmakers Sakai Ko and Hamaguchi Ryusuke proposes storytelling as a transformative and empowering process, bearing social and political implications in such contexts as this recently ravaged region in northern Japan. Presented by the filmmakers themselves with curators Koyo Yamashita and Eduardo Thomas, and theoretician Ayako Saito. The Sound of the Waves Friday, 30 May, 2pm, Voices from the Waves Saturday, 31 May, 2pm, Storytellers Saturday, 31 May, 9pm
Andrea Tonacci’s film archive is opened for the first time to the public in Indigenous Activism in the Americas, a program exploring the video interviews made by the Italian filmmaker in the 1970s with different indigenous leaders in North, Central, and South America, led by artists Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham, together with art historian Richard Hill and Shuar leader Ampam Karakras. Part 1, Friday, 30 May, 4pm, Part 2, Friday, 30 May, 6pm
Produced on location at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and broadcast live on Bayerischer Rundfunk, 1001 Reality: Sequels for an unfinished novel by artist Eran Schaerf uses the format of the radio play to continue the narrative of Tamra, philosopher Jacqueline Kahanoff’s unfinished novel, querying the relevance of the Levantine model for postcolonial Europe. Friday, 30 May, 9pm
The presentation Unreliable Narrators: Stings to Leaks to Citizen Vigilantes by CAMP examines three categories of media central to the articulation of India as a control society over the past five years, forms of surveillance and circulation deployed both by and against hegemonic formations of power. Saturday, 31 May, 6pm
Using documentaries, photojournalism, original interviews, observational footage, popular music, and low-budget films, Narco-Capitalism. Mexico on the Brink is a series of presentations by cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer with documentarist Jesse Lerner and journalist Sergio González Rodríguez that aim to unpack the intersections of extreme violence, the atrophy of the state, and narco-culture in Mexico. The Femicide Machine Saturday, 31 May, 9pm, In Praise of El Narco Sunday, 1 June, 4pm, A Failure of the State?, Sunday, 1 June, 6pm
Artist Roee Rosen enlists fiction to obliquely approach the relationships between identity, the archive, fabulation, and truth in Buried Alive—an elaborate multimedia fabrication presenting a cast of fictive, diasporic, ex-Soviet artists living as much at odds with their adopted Israeli culture as with the one they left behind. A screening and live concert are followed by a talk with curator and writer David Riff. Sunday, 1 June, 9pm
Three films made by Parviz Kimiavi in the 1970s are presented in the presence of the filmmaker, followed by a discussion exploring the films’ reflections on cultural tradition, modernity, and national identity that arguably produced allegories of Iran during a period of tremendous transformation. The Stone Garden and P Like Pelican Friday, 30 May, 9pm, The Mongols Saturday, 31 May, 6pm
Television documentary series by filmmaker Morteza Avini, pioneer of the little-known Iranian genre “Sacred Defense Cinema” that appeared with the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, are screened and discussed by curator Catherine David and anthropologist Pedram Khosronejad. Truth, Sunday, 1 June, 6pm, Narration of Triumph, Sunday, 1 June, 9pm
Al Jazeera Replay (Feb 1–4, 2011), conceived by writer Sohrab Mohebbi, takes the form of a continuous screening of a four-day period in Al Jazeera English’s comprehensive coverage of the Egyptian revolts of January 2011, examining how the network became the medium for the revolution, and perhaps a medium of the revolution. Conversation with AJE correspondent Rawya Rageh and media scholar Scott Bridges. Saturday, 31 May, 4pm
In a speculative response to the historical fascination of cinema, the four-part film installation by Harun Farocki, Parallel I–IV, inserts video games into a longer history of visuality. Public talk, Saturday, 31 May, 2pm, installation, 29 May–1 June
A seminar exploring issues of preservation, authenticity, and the document in the built environment, Preservation Design looks at preservation as a process concerned with the past as much as with the construction of contemporary politics and identities, with architect Nikolaus Hirsch and architecture historians Thordis Arrhenius, Beatriz Colomina, and Jorge Otero-Pailos. Saturday, 31 May, noon
School (2009–11) by artist Smadar Dreyfus is an audiovisual installation immersing the visitor in the life of Tel Aviv secondary schools, offering small, quotidian moments that broach broader questions of nationhood and belonging. Installation 29 May–14 July
Michael Baers retells the story of Khaled Hourani’s two-year-long effort to bring a painting by Picasso to Palestine in the summer of 2011 in An Oral History of Picasso in Palestine—a graphic novel charting the intersections of modernism, occupation, statehood, and security, against the backdrop of the broad set of issues which comprise Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Reading with Dalia Taha, Samir Harb, Yazid Anani, Nienke Terpsma, and Robert Hamelijnck. Thursday, 29 May, 10pm. Online graphic novel berlindocumentaryforum.de
Films and talks for children tackle philosophical questions through playful approaches: the two-part program The Way Things Go features documentaries, artists’ films, and discussions on the origins, condition, and transience of what exists in the world. Led by Stefanie Schlüter with contributions from Peter Fischli, Ben Russell, Ingo Niermann, Alexa Karolinski, and others. Part 1, Friday, 30 May, 2pm, Part 2, Sunday, 1 June, 2pm
Music and drinks at 11pm every evening during Berlin Documentary Forum 3, with DJ sets by Gudrun Gut, Ronald Lippok, Pharoah Chromium, DJ Grooviana, and Tehran Carnival. Programmed by Berlin-based composer Nicholas Bussmann.
Publication
Following its tradition, Berlin Documentary Forum has produced an extensive magazine to accompany its third edition that features—in addition to event information and the festival schedule—essays and conversations with participants including Jimmie Durham, Sylvère Lotringer, and Eran Schaerf, and contributions from commissioned authors such as Christa Blümlinger and Stella Bruzzi. Edited by Berlin Documentary Forum Artistic Director Hila Peleg and writer Erika Balsom, the magazine is free of charge in combination with any purchased entrance ticket to the festival.
Artistic Director: Hila Peleg
Research and Program Coordination: Koen Claerhout, Nadja Talmi
Contact and newsletter: berlin.doc.forum [at] hkw.de
Press contact: Anne Maier: anne.maier [at] hkw.de / T +49 (0) 30 39787 153
Tickets can be bought in advance online, or at the venue pending availability: hkw.de/tickets
The Berlin Documentary Forum is produced by Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Haus der Kulturen der Welt is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as by the Federal Foreign Office.
School (2009–11) was commissioned by the Creative Foundation for the Folkestone Triennial 2011, with generous support from Outset Contemporary Art Fund and Arts Council England. The Berlin edition is funded by the Capital Cultural Fund.
