With its theme of ‘Remembering’, UNDERDOX places the evocative and preservative power of the cinematic medium at the heart of its 21st issue.
Statement by the festival directors on the theme of ‘Remembering’
“We understand this year’s theme, ‘Remembering’, as an invitation to a form of seeing that reaches deep into the past. Through films, we encounter images of what has been. With them, we remember bygone times—also in the sense of a shared culture of remembrance. We recall films we have seen before, making memory itself an aesthetic question.
At the moment of projection, films also open up a biographical space of resonance. They connect with the thoughts and memories we ourselves bring into the cinema, allowing personal recollection and collective history to intertwine.“ – Dunja Bialas and Bernd Brehmer, Heads of UNDERDOX
Archivio Aperto (Bologna) – German Premiere
The archive occupies a singular place within cinema’s capacity to preserve and remember. In collaboration with Archivio Aperto in Bologna, the festival organised by Fondazione Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, the 21st edition of UNDERDOX presents Memory & Archive, a programme of contemporary short films selected from previous editions of the festival that creatively reuse archival footage, with a particular focus on private and amateur memories.
Within these fragile moving images, the past is reactivated in the present moment of projection. The screening space, in turn, becomes inhabited by our own memories, as archival images enter into dialogue with personal recollections. – Curated as part of Young People’s Choice.
Michal Kosakowski: HOLOFICTION
The Polish-German media artist Michał Kosakowski examines the iconography of the Holocaust in narrative cinema through a montage composed of thousands of fictional after-images. Recurring visual patterns draw on the historical footage recorded at the end of the Second World War, unfolding into a haunting essay on collective memory—on the ways in which the images of the Holocaust have become inscribed in our visual consciousness.
Stanley Schtinter: LAST MOVIES – German Premiere
In his compilation feature LAST MOVIES, the British filmmaker Stanley Schtinter assembles a meticulously researched, idiosyncratic history of cinema through the final films watched by celebrated figures before their deaths. What were the last films seen by Franz Kafka, F. W. Murnau, Charlie Chaplin, Sergio Leone, John F. Kennedy, Olof Palme, or Kurt Cobain—before memory itself was extinguished forever?
Norbert Pfaffenbichler: ADGIN PRRRX – German Premiere
The Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Norbert Pfaffenbichler dismantles John Frankenheimer’s Formula One classic Grand Prix (1966) into its individual shots before reassembling them according to the strict metric principle of shot duration. The result is a mesmerizing choreography of remembrance in which the relentless repetition of images seems to suspend the forward movement of time. Even as we watch the film unfold, we find ourselves already remembering what we have just seen.
Laura Coppens: SEDIMENTE
Laura Coppen’s grandfather was born during the Second World War, came of age in the GDR, and trained as a physician. Later recruited by the Stasi as an unofficial collaborator, he was abruptly abandoned after refusing to sever ties with his daughter, who had fallen in love with a Spaniard and emigrated to Madrid. “We are the people!”—Christa Wolf’s speech on 4 November 1989 in East Berlin. Super 8 memories of young grandparents: summer holidays, first love, black hair. An intoxicating essay film in which private memory and political history become inseparably intertwined.