MITTE MEDIA FESTIVAL

5 – 6 May, 2017

Locations:
FATA MORGANA, Torstraße 170
Z-Bar, Bergstraße 2

Mitte Media Festival is pleased to present a three-day, multi-venue celebration of video, film, publication and performance works through a spectrum of media starting on May 5th and ending on May 6th. 

The realization of an idea, as it winds its way through the human mind and body, then is communicated to other creative entities, and finally translated and presented in other media is the process from which Mitte Media Festival draws its conceptual energy.

Hosted by Fata Morgana and its partners and presented in a small group of venues in Mitte, Berlin, Mitte Media Festival also shines a light on the neighborhood’s role as a hub of creation and presentation of multi-media work, as well as the start-up culture that often powers these dynamic permutations.  The sheer change and transition that has occurred in Mitte in the last 10 years makes the area a perfect example of the collision between the terrestrially creativity and ever-expanding digital processes and platforms.

Book presentations, experimental video shows with discussion and other events will typically be presented in two-hour slots, allowing viewers to encounter a variety of work in a variety of settings. Mitte Media Festival is also planning its own online LIVE STREAM providing viewers across the globe access to selected content.

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

Directors Lounge at Mitte Media


Mitte Media Festival partners include: FATA MORGANA, Leo Kuelbs Collection, coGalleries, Konstantin Kopietz, Last Night in Berlin, Chased Magazine, BRLO, Directors Lounge, Z-Bar and more.  

Sponsored by BRLO, FATA MORGANA, coGalleries, Leo Kuelbs Collection, Z-Bar, Last Night in Berlin, Chased

More information at: www.leokuelbscollection.com

Directors Lounge Screening
Ana Bilankov
Night Riders
Thursday, 30 March 2017
21:00
Z-Bar Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Ana Bilankov, Berlin based artist with Croatian background, creates videos connected with peculiar places in different European cities, Moscow and New York, connected with the geographies and stories of those places, mostly interwoven with her own biography or experience. Her short films often combine a brittle visual poetry with rarified narratives on the soundtrack. Her training in art history and German studies in Zagreb together with her Master in Art in Context in Berlin seem to give her the intuition to pick out places and situations that become metaphors for things unspoken or stories untold. It may also have been her biography, which sensitized her for the hidden traces in human geographies, namely her escape from war while it spread over former Yugoslavia. The artist on the other hand calls it her “search for Roland Barthes’ punctum” in the geography of the city.

Her video pictures are conceived like extended snapshots that unfold, and become meaningful over time. Sound and text work complementary and associative to the pictures and are often from more divers sources than the image. When she points to the former Transatlantic slave trade connected with the sugar manufacturing in Bristol in her film “Sweet Home”, to the poisonous wreckage of Newtown Creek of East River NY in “New Town Future Film”, or to the story of an old broken Jewish House in Vienna (“I want to get out”), the artist never uses a traditional documentary style or storytelling. Instead, the films often comprise a poetic multi-layered audio-visual composition that leaves it open to the viewer to follow all the laid-out traces or to create their own associative connections.

Her film “U Ratu i Revoluciji / In War and Revolution” goes back to Croatia to visit her grandmother and to look for the traces of a book about education during the resistance against the Nazi occupation written by her grandfather, which disappeared as “communist and inappropriate” during political changes an the war of the early 1990s in Croatia. Her grandmother’s fading memories become a metaphor for those lost historical memories of the past, when books are eliminated from the libraries.

The artist will introduce the screening and will be available for Q&A. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Artist Link:
http://www.anabilankov.com/

Links:
Directors Lounge   http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm   http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar   http://www.z-bar.de

Snaps from our screening

Directors Lounge Screening
Urban Research – Private Affair
Thursday, 26 January 2017 | 21:00
Z-Bar | Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

In the times of public intrusion into the private sphere, right wing populists and religious fundamentalists threatening the freedom of expression and diversity, and conservative politicians pressing for control and surveillance, the expressions of private life become a political affair again. Related to the slogan of 1968 “The personal is political”, the here presented films talk about personal or private affairs in relation to the public sphere and the urban space.

Many of the Urban Research films submitted in 2016 are dealing with private stories, that are related, in one way or the other, to the urban space and expressing the importance of freedom and solidarity for the divergent, the subversive and the liberal mind. The films present the small stories with high artistic aspiration, the nuanced views and the subjective diversity, which are even more important at times when populist positions start to replace distinguished sentiments in culture and politics.

A fine selection of Urban Research films shown at 48h Neukölln in addition to a brand new film by Penny Lane. And, films by Petra Lottje, Vladimir Turner, Rob Santaguida, Anna Okrasko, Doris Schmid, Salise Hughes, Eleonore de Montesquiou, and Ezra Wube

Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Snaps from this screening

Directors Lounge Screening
James Edmonds
The Material Question
Thursday, 24 November 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

“The cinema of James Edmonds (1983) explores the complexities of the real not as a mere substance named ‘reality’ but in its most fluctuating and Turnerian correlation, in those uncertainties that make it impossible to fix it in any specific point in space.”(Toni D’angela, La furia umana 28, 2016)

James Edmonds is an artist filmmaker from the UK living in Berlin and London. His practice centers on a personal poetics in which the nature of recording, when approached from the materiality of analogue film, offers a tangible surface for what is intangible and fleeting – our personal experience, inner worlds, thoughts and reflections.

He has presented screenings and exhibitions at various venues, project spaces, galleries and cinema events, including Fronteira Festival Brasil, The Temenos Screening Kino Xenix Zurich, Another Vacant Space Berlin, Mystetskyi Arsenal Lavra Kiev and ACCEA Armenia. Since 2015 he also curates the monthly film series Light Movement in Berlin.

PROGRAM
– Movement and Stillness, 2015, super 8, 11min, colour, silent
– Inside Outside, 2008/2015, super8, 6min, colour, soundtrack
– Sternwarten der Welt / Sun Documents, 2010-11/2016 (in progress), super8 double projection, 6min, colour, soundtrack
– OVERLAND, 2016, super 8, 22min, colour and black+white, soundtrack
– Patterns of Summer, (in progress), super8, 3 mins, colour, silent

Artist Link:
http://jamesedmonds.org
http://light-movement.blogspot.de

Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Directors Lounge Screening

Bruno Gularte Barreto
5 Houses

Thursday, 3 November 2016
19:00
Blender & Co
Boddinstrasse 32
12053 Berlin
U8 Boddinstrasse

The Brazlian director and photographer Bruno Gularte Barreto comes to Berlin to present his new film project “5 Houses”. The idea of “5 Houses” revolves around trying to recreate childhood memories’ images, but it is also a journey through the lives of the people in a small town in the extreme south of Brasil.

5 HOUSES is a feature documentary project portraying the houses and lives of 5 different characters. They talk about life and death, memory, education, prejudice, violence and share their experiences and beliefs. Though they are very diverse people, they share a connection in their relationship with the director`s childhood memories. Each person and house to be portrayed was part of his upbringing throughout his childhood and formative years.

Besides being part of the same array of memories, these characters share another characteristic: the fact they are all, in their own way, “outsiders” in the somewhat narrow-minded place where they live.

During the film, a portrait is revealed, an image of the city itself and the way some people, even-though humble, can help change other people’s lives for the better. In the last house we have a fifth character, who is actually present in the other four segments in the figure of the director – an invisible observer who frames and chooses where, what and who to look at.

Original title: 5 Casas, English title: 5 Houses.
Director: Bruno Gularte Barreto
Producer: Jessica Luz
50 mins work-in-progress
English subtitles Brazil, 2016

Artist Link:
http://besourofilmes.com/projetos/
Vimeo.com/besourofilmes/5houses  password: 55555

Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Blender & Co.  http://blenderandco.de

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Q&A with the filmaker and curator | photo: Kenton Turk/DL

More pictures

Directors Lounge Screening
Urban Research – Spectra of Space

Thursday, 27 October 2016
21:00 ,
Z-Bar ,
Bergstraße 2,
10115 Berlin-Mitte

The idea of scale in architectural contemplations reflects on the meaning of the space, also scale connects with urban topology and contemporary ideas of social geography. Social, political, or personal impacts may be seen differently if seen from different point of views: looking from a global, national, municipal, personal, community-based or journalistic point of view.

These new films create spatial contemplations or film essays from Chicago, San Francisco, Berlin, New York, Canada, from a historical literature connection (Kerouac) or even the virtual space of a Si-Fi film series.
The screening presents a diversity of films connected with architecture, urban space and landscape from documentary to experimental, and will create an interesting visual dialogue about urban space in film.

Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Snaps from our monthly Directors Lounge Screenings

Directors Lounge Screening:

Spatial Relations
Deborah Uhde and Melissa Faivre
Thursday, 28. July 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Two young artists who recently moved to Berlin present their experimental video work. On a first view their work seems to be very similar as they use associative techniques of montage and editing, and both demand an active viewer who positively combines and completes the offered pictures to their own interpretation or, story.

This applies specifically to two of the films, “The Space In Between” by Melissa Faivre and “State of the Art of the State – a Dysfunctional Machine“ by Deborah Uhde. Both films seem to work with loosely connected images, which do not easily combine as a story and are brought together by rhythmic editing and a poetic film language. Both films deal with spacial relations, with the space between people and objects, between objects and exterior or interior space and the space between camera and subject.

The film by Melissa Faivre shows two domestic spaces and two people interacting in those spaces, mostly using cameras. One of the spaces has a large bed, a makeshift steel frame and two windows, the other one lots of electronic equipment. The reason for the interaction stays obscure, it may just be a spacial exploration. The gazes from and to the camera distorted by analogue and digital means to reveal secrets about the place or the people or about their relation and it creates some suspense. The interaction seems to follow some performative rule. The viewer is not really asked to analyze the fragments but to put together the pieces of distorted and rhythmically edited information to some visual-poetic experience.

Deborah Uhde’s piece “State of the Art of the State – a Dysfunctional Machine“ seems to be made of pieces of information about a space in a very different way. Views of a science campus, the “physikalisch-technische Bundesanstalt Braunschweig”, are being combined on a double screen and edited in associative ways. The rhythm of the pictures is slow and seems to follow the pace of a documented research, the cataloguing and search for art on the campus as the subtitles state. However, we rarely get to see art, at least no paintings or sculptures but strange constellations of buildings, containers, rulers, marks and construction signs, any of which could be part of some art project but very unlikely is so. The one object that looks very much like a modernist sculpture, a steel object that combines spheres and poles, apparently is an object for measurement as the viewer is informed by subtitles. Deborah’s film thus combines spatial views in a poetical and rhythmical way, but then it seems, she rather asks the viewer to critically engage and make their own distinctions between aesthetic and utilitarian spatial use.

Both filmmakers present a number of very different films, set between the documentary and experimental forms. A program of very fresh new experimental films from filmmakers living in Berlin and coming from France/Netherlands and Braunschweig/Germany.

Artist Link:
http://melissafaivre.com/
http://duhde.de

Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Impressions of the Directors Lounge Screening “Spatial Relations” with
Deborah Uhde and Melissa Faivre

Directors Lounge Screening
Urban Research Special
Topophilia – Landscapes and Harbours | Claudia Guilino

Thursday, 30 June 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Two shorts and one feature about the interference of the technical world of shipping and oil with landscapes and the city. Twice the Port of Los Angeles is the starting point for visual exploration. One goes up north along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the other examines the harbor at night. The harbor of Veracruz on the other hand is the place for a histographical reconsideration of the Mexican harbor from a very personal point of view.

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Topophilia by Peter Bo Rappmund surveys the 800-mile length of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and travels alongside the conduit as it bobs above and underground from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields to its terminus at Valdez. The extreme linearity and continuity of the pipeline acts as a pivot point to reorganize the landscape and offers new and idiosyncratic ways to visually reconsider topography. The film confronts the extreme beauty of the North-American landscape with the seemingly safe infrastructure of oil transport.

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Veracruz Without Ship by Teresa Delgado & Jakob Kirchheim. A documentary melodrama with privatizations and without lovers. A poetic walk through Veracruz, port of European exiles and Mexican oil, of melodrama and of the rhythm danzón. // Since 1938 Lázaro Cárdenas government offered political asylum to thousands of Spanish republicans who were fleeing war and persecution. They arrived to the port of Veracruz, unreachable paradise for the defeated who could not leave Spain. We revisit this myth of the grandparents and confront it with the present in 2014. In this year the PRI government is opening the doors to private investment of multinationals in a natural resource which Mexicans consider their own: oil. Oil plays an important role in the Gulf of Mexico and Mexican oil was nationalized by Cárdenas government in 1938.

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Port Noir by Laura Kraning. Within the machine landscape of Terminal Island, the textural strata of a 100 year old boat shop provides a glimpse into Los Angeles Harbor’s disappearing past. Often recast as a backdrop for fictional crime dramas, the scenic details of the last boatyard evoke imaginary departures and a hidden world at sea.

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Program addition:
We are deeply mourning the loss of our close friend Claudia Guilino and will show two videos by her

Stony Sleep  6 min 24s  2011
Abgesang, kupferfarben 3 min 52s 2009

Claudia Guilino was part of the Directors Lounge family from the early days, supporting our project with love and enthusiasm. Claudia passed away on June 26. She will be deeply missed.

Team Directors Lounge

Artist Link:
http://www.peterborappmund.name/
https://peterborappmund.exposure.co/
http://www.laurakraning.com
http://www.jakob-kirchheim.de/
http://www.agencia-tess.de

http://www.calla-mar.com/

Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Directors Lounge Screening
Mark Street
More or Less of Me and the Street

Thursday, 28 April 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Mark Street, Filmmaker coming in from New York, has been making films, videos and installations for 30 years.  His work has moved from tactile, abstract explorations of 16mm film to essays on the urban experience to improvised feature length narratives. Street works in the tradition of street photography, recording images almost every day,  exploring the tension between improvisation and structure. He has shown at places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as venues such as a former strip club in New Orleans called the Pussycat Cavern.

The artist will be present. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Artist Link:
http://www.markstreetfilms.com/
Links:
Directors Lounge  http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm  http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar  http://www.z-bar.de

Directors Lounge Screening
Alex Ross
Tom Atkins Blues
Thursday, 26 May 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Alex Ross, a filmmaker from the UK who has lived in Berlin since 1993, presents a common story of neighbourhood displacement in the heart of Berlin. Or, we could also describe it, an amiable tale of Prenzlauer Berg from a time almost forgotten. Shortly after Reunification, when most of the houses are already refurbished, the Spätkauf (late-night convenience shop) still provides a place you could call a home, or a community. Alex Ross mixes narrative feature with documentation, not only by including intermittent interviews, but also short scenes which actually occurred in one way or another in the same shop. And he possibly brings his own stories into the film, from a time some time ago when he worked at the very same Spätkauf, shortly after finishing film school in Bournemouth, when he was fresh in Berlin and trying to settle in.

When (in story time) the supermarket suddenly announces it will be staying open until late at night (as it did in reality), the little shop loses its customers and the protagonist his meaning of life. Progress takes its toll. In real life, the shop was converted into a café, which still exists today, while the supermarket (Kaiser’s) closed down a few years later.

Original English-German with English subtitles. Curated by Klaus W.
Eisenlohr. The director will be present for a Q&A.

Artist Link:
https://tomatkinsblues.wordpress.com
http://weakheartdrop.com

Links:
Directors Lounge   http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm   http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar   http://www.z-bar.de

DL | Talk with Alex Ross (DL Deep Feature: “The Two-Edged Tongue”)

NEW! Snaps from the Directors Lounge Screenings at Z-inema, Z-Bar, Berlin: Alex Ross | Tom Atkins Blues
https://de.pinterest.com/directorslounge/directors-lounge-screenings-at-z-bar-berlin/