ONCE UPON A TIME IN GERMANY
Directors: Wiebke Thomsen, Johannes Thomsen
Documentary | Germany | 2022
80 min | Stereo
56th Hof International Film Festival
2022
Special screening
Apathetic landscapes, refractive light, some bird and the window to the tallow-swollen living room of patterned wallpaper and trivia. Editing. Tough plan sequences inflate moments to hangings and shatter their tremulous spectatorship. Thundering leitmotifs – like German disinterest in permanent intoxication – without backrest or lederhosen. Black-red-gold on full mast, the cinema is dead. Long live the cinema.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN GERMANY – a home movie reading cabinet of German memory culture from the 1960s to the 1980s. A visually associative cut-up film has been created from over 50 kilometers of Super 8mm found footage, which the two directors soundtrack live with self-composed tape soundscapes and sampled text fragments of German Dada, Beat and underground literature. An analog cinema experience that breaks with cinema and at the same time formulates a declaration of love for cinema.
Screenplay WIEBKE THOMSEN, JOHANNES THOMSEN, BEATRICE FAGO, CHRISTIAN PREUSS, Cinematography JOHANNES THOMSEN, Editing WIEBKE THOMSEN, Sound JOHANNES THOMSEN, Production WIEBKE THOMSEN, JOHANNES THOMSEN