The Shorts In Season Film Festival Summer Edition celebrates bold, brilliant European short films on the big screen. After each block, the host will run discussions with attending filmmakers.
The program highlights come from two Berlin-based filmmakers: Cadenza Zhao’s most personal work, ‘The Lover’, Dominika Gayny’s David Lynch inspired, emotionally charged ‘The Highway’, and Estonian filmmaker Steven Kristjan Tšoba’s surreal directorial debut ‘Mango’.
MANGO DIR Steven Kristjan Tšoba (10.00, Estonia)
Young and handsome playboy Kaarel goes on a first date to Tuule’s apartment. Tuule asks Kaarel to sing like a bird.
THE HIGHWAY DIR Dominika Gayny (5.18, Poland)
A woman speeds down the highway, struggling to slow down – not just in her car, but in love.
THE LOVER DIR Cadenza Zhao (15.00, Germany)
Haunted by grief, Daniel fills the void with casual sex, hoping to escape his loneliness. But when he can no longer ignore the truth, he’s forced to face the emotions he has been running from.
JULIENNE OF LIGHT BULBS DIR Dave Lojek (5.28, Germany)
In a magician's private stand-off, two practitioners must brave tricky challenges to demonstrate a hidden ability.
BELOW THE END DIR Joscha Bürger (6.58, Germany)
Emma dances in bunker-like catacombs at an illegal rave. She stumbles upon an American soldier who warns her of an impending danger.
JOURNEY DIR Lee O'Connor (11:00, Germany)
A three-part experimental short film based on the poems written by Luke O'Connor.
THE NEAPOLITAN PLOT DIR Jan Melkebeek (17:36, Belgium)
A band of petty mobsters with no love for each other is forced to sit through a comically tense emergency meeting
Come network with creative minds and experience a wide range of perspectives on the big screen, while supporting grassroots cinema and the deserving works of local and European filmmakers. Tickets are limited and priced at only €5 each.
The film series Transit – Stories of Travellers and Migrants explores the places where we were born and raised, as well as the places to which we have migrated and where we live today. We are filmmakers born in the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Palestine, and Israel, who eventually found ourselves in Germany, Israel, or elsewhere: some by choice, others not. Some of our migrations are geographical and external; others are political, emotional, and internal. Some of the countries we come from no longer exist, while others are struggling for their future and self-definition.
Driven by a desire to understand the particular perspective of migrants, we journey into our own pasts while taking a critical look at the present. In this film series, we bring our films and ourselves together and enter into dialogue with one another – even when, or precisely because, our narratives contradict each other, even when one person's arrival marks the beginning of another's uprooting.
Masel Tov Cocktail – 30 min
German with English subtitles
Migrant? Russian? Jewish? All of the above. That's Dima. And Dima lives in Germany, out of all places. He didn't choose any of this. But then he happens to break a classmate's nose… Dima is the protagonist of "Masel Tov Cocktail", a 30-minute fiction film that approaches the subject of being Jewish in Germany in a highly entertaining and (self-)ironic way.
Super Women – 80 min
Russian and Hebrew with English subtitles
The protagonists of "Super Women" are migrant, Russian, and Jewish too: this documentary follows five women working at the checkout of a supermarket in Tel Aviv, recounting their personal stories against the backdrop of life in Israel during the 2000s.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and rising antisemitism prompted many Jews to leave their homelands during the 1980s and 1990s. Being Jewish was recorded in Soviet passports – visible to all – even though most Jews in the Soviet Union lived secular lives. More than 200,000 people came to Germany as Jewish quota refugees, while over 800,000 moved to Israel. Both migration movements were politically orchestrated. Germany understood this as an act of reparation for the Shoah; Israel justified it by invoking the historical homeland. Yet officials and major media outlets in both countries failed to mention that many of those who arrived were highly educated academics whose degrees and social status were effectively reset to zero upon migration.
From 10:00 am – Doors open
11:00 am – "Masel Tov Cocktail" (fiction film, 30 min.)
11:30 am – "Super Women" (documentary, 80 min.)
approx. 1:30 pm – Conversation in the foyer
Included with your ticket: a bruschetta or a sfogliata.
Yael Reuveny and Evgenia Gostrer (curators) with Arkadij Khaet (director, "Masel Tov Cocktail") and Dr. Dina Berdichevsky (literary scholar)
The film series takes place in cooperation with the Institut für Neue Soziale Plastik. The Institut für Neue Soziale Plastik is a collective of Jewish and antisemitism-critical directors, dramaturgs, authors, and artists. Since its founding in 2015, it has developed artistic projects from a Jewish perspective on Jewish life and history, memory culture, and antisemitism. A further focus of its work is advising cultural institutions, independent groups, curators, and artists on questions of antisemitism.
https://neue-soziale-plastik.de/en/
