Since 2006, the Film Institute of the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) has been publishing DVDs with selected filmic works by graduates of the Art and Media programme. So far, more than 50 monographic DVDs have been published. From experimental film to documentary works to narrative works, these editions represent the wide range of cinematic forms created in this degree programme.

Three new releases with highly acclaimed works by Eren Aksu, Ivan Marković and Kristof Trakal will be the occasion for a presentation in the presence of the filmmakers as well as professor Thomas Arslan.

7 pm:

OTHER THAN THAT, I'M FINE (2020, 14') and COSMORAMA (2015, 8') by Eren Aksu & FROM TOMORROW ON, I WILL (2019, 60') by Ivan Marković.

In both his feature films and his documentaries, Eren Aksu refrains from a dramaturgy oriented towards climaxes, instead leaving plenty of room for intermediate tones and suspended states. The young Turkish protagonist of Eren Aksu's feature film OTHER THAN THAT I'M FINE is new to Berlin, has ambitions as an actress and auditions for a job narrating the Turkish-language audio guide for the Pergamon Museum. The political conditions in Turkey have caused many young people to emigrate to Berlin. Asli is one of them. Eren Aksu's film sensitively describes her attempt to arrive in the city. "Other Than That I'm Fine" won the 3sat sponsorship award at the 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2020. In the short fiction film COSMORAMA, a young Turkish couple takes a trip to a small island near Istanbul. From the distance of the island, the city they live in and the idea of returning there to their everyday lives seems unreal and unreal.

Ivan Marković's documentaries and feature films, in which he also directs the camera himself, are characterised by an eye for apt detail and a calmness that allows connections to emerge only gradually without forcing them. The feature film FROM TOMORROW ON, I WILL is set in Beijing and depicts the everyday life of the night watchman Li. He moved here a few years ago and is trying to arrive in the city. Li lives in a makeshift dwelling without windows, guards a modern office building at night and roams the streets of the gigantic metropolis during the day. Surrounded by forbidding architecture, strangers, avalanches of cars and noise, Li remains a foreign body in the city, in which he finds no place or space for himself and his needs. FROM TOMORROW ON I WILL screened at many international film festivals and won several top prizes. 

9 pm:

PREPARATIONS (2019, 84') by Kristof Trakal.

Kristof Trakal has been working towards his experimental feature-length film PREPARATIONS for a long time. Inspired by US survivalist videos and melodrama structures, it tells the story of a group of millennials who prepare an attack or sabotage action on a sealed-off (unspecified) test site. The film concentrates entirely on the phase of preparation and planning of the action. The young members of the group are largely socialised through computers, the internet and the use of simple consumer video cameras. However, it is not Trakal's film that conducts "milieu studies", but the protagonists within the narrative itself and among themselves. They are constantly filming each other and are themselves material for observation and investigation.  In "Preparations", Trakal understands melodrama as a generational conflict. When an older ex-activist released from prison joins the group, problems of understanding are pre-programmed due to the different worlds of experience. The form of the film is heterogeneous: computer screens, video tutorials, drone footage and the camera footage of the group members dominate the image plane for long stretches and do not allow for an objectifying view of the events. A film about multi-layered conditions, in an appropriate form.