Directors Lounge Screening Theo Thiesmeier Film Notes and Moments

Theo Thiesmeier | Film Notes and Moments

Directors Lounge Screening Theo Thiesmeier Film Notes and Moments Thursday, 31 October 2019 |  9 p.m. / 21h Z-Bar | Bergstraße 2 | 10115 Berlin-Mitte Everyday experiences are the subject of filmmaker Theo Thiesmeier, also in his works with still photography. The Berlin artist studied with Peter Kubelka in Frankfurt and Robert Breer at Cooper …

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Mitte Media Festival

Continuing The Dazzle

Directors Lounge at Mitte Media Festival 2019. More spliters of light and shadow, colour and monochrome, scream and silence are set to crystallize out of the chaos of the cosmos, all this (potentially) before your very eyes. This can only mean Directors Lounge is shaking the sparks out of its treasure box and letting them …

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Directors Lounge Screening. Gabriele Stellbaum My House Is On Fire

Gabriele Stellbaum | My House Is On Fire

Directors Lounge Screening

Thursday, 29 November 2018 9pm | Z-Bar

Gabriele Stellbaum creates art films that are performance and story-based at the same time. It is the second time, the artist presents her work at Directors Lounge. Coming from sculpture, she turned to light projections and time-based multi-channel slide projects and finally to video. The program presents a number of very new and more recent works that she created in Berlin. … read more

Directors Lounge Screening
Johnny Welch
Arcane Rhythms

Thursday, 25 October 2018
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Johnny Welch, filmmaker and photographer from Sydney, Australia lives in Berlin for more than 3 years and is an active member of Labor Berlin. Since coming to Berlin, his work has become more strongly connected with the aesthetic of analog film, with the possibilities of optical printing. Even if edited and projected digitally, analog compositing seems to allow him to create a richer image of high density and depth.

Based on black and white techniques (mostly), the films seem to explore sheer blackness, instead of a black and white aesthetic. Strongly connected with punk music, dark wave and electronic noise, the filmmaker achieves a stunning quality of deep black color with his films. Experimental techniques of emulsion lifts and cracks, combined with black ink, sometimes with an additional tint of red or toning with blue, are combined with dark images of male and female characters. The driving rhythm of the sound track enhances the impression of blackness. Another connection is Aleister Crowley, a controversial figure, and a British occultist from the beginning of the 20th century who inspired a number of important artists and filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and even Fernando Pessoa. Welch’s film Aurum (super8 / digital) from 2018 is a contribution to Crowley’s Liber 777, a book related to occult or cabalistic games with numbers. For Johnny Welch, the occupation and meditation with occult theory may be a search for liberating ideas, or it may even be used as a release from the haunting personal messages once ago sent by peers. (Discharge Working I and II, 2017/18).

For the viewer, the work has an attracting, maybe haunting quality, tinted with a stunning black color. The black sun (in Aurum) for example is an amazing symbol without the need of occult references, and it is a beautiful image interwoven with blackness of painted film material that may stay in the mind of the viewer as a striking image on its own account.

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

Artist Link:
https://www.johnnywelchfilm.com/

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

Directors Lounge Screening
Dagie Brundert
Ode an Sommer
Saturday, 27 May 2017
21:00
Z-Bar Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Ode an Sommer – Ode to Summer
Berlin’s cultural scene would not be the same, if filmmaker Dagie Brundert was not there. The artist started off in the 90’s with some female colleagues as FBI, Freie Berliner Ischen. With ironic and unconventional films they challenged established and artsy art forms, skewed films spiced up with resonances of Camp and Beat, as it reverberated in some young circles in the first decade after the breakdown of the wall. Since then, Brundert stuck to her guns of Super-8 filmmaking with admirable creative productivity. She records everyday occurrences, the obvious things on sight and the things offside, however always dispersing a positive message.

The new program at Z-Bar presents a number of brand new films, one premiere (“Widerstand”, 2017, resistance) and a few rare early films. “Ode an Juni 4 “ (2016, Ode to June), the film giving the name to this program, is one of the few medium long films by Brundert. And, it is part of her favorite seasonal project. She has planned to record a film about June every year. Film developing in biological developer, a trip to the film festival Hamburg, establishing a new dark room, a bath in lake Teufelssee and the hand written numbers of the days are some of the scenes of last years diary, all of which being hand-developed, digitally edited and underscored with summer tunes. It is the small things in the film, the joys of everyday life, which, condensed by a combination of time-lapse and short cuts, makes the film poetic and amiable. It is this delight about exceptional but unspectacular moments, which inform her films, and which still oppose the garish images of the media or the attempts of “going viral” on social media, and which still reminds me of the bearings of the Beats.

In a number of new films, goes back to humorous forms she used back in the past: narrated films (“Bin ich reich? Bin ich reich? Bin ich reich?…” 2015), using objects as characters ("Lametta” 2016), or games from childhood (potato stamps in “Kartoffel” 2013). Other films follow a more discriptive style. The savvy viewers and the friends, however, do not expect new experimental forms from Dagie, but they like to follow her frame of mind, the lighthearted way to look at life. Her films often have the effect of a line of a pop song that suddenly enters your mind and changes the way you look at yourself or your surrounding.

Dagie Brundert will be present for Q&A. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr.

Artist Link:
http://www.dagiebrundert.de/
https://yumyumsoups.wordpress.com/

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
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/