Cultural Autopsy: Other Worlds Deja Vu, Lisl Ponger (Austria 1999,video / originally 35mm film, 23 min) Somewhere in a subtropical country white visitors crowd around dark skinned plantation workers emptying their harvest baskets. They look curious, as if wanting to test the quality of the tea leaves. The fascinated gaze on the foreigners fixes them in pre-formed frames. Lisl Ponger follows the trail of that gaze by taking amateur found footage material and linking it together in new ways. She summons up atmospheric background sounds and adds a series of voices. On the soundtrack the people, who usually are pictured in the west as much more homogeneous than they are, tell of their experiences with various forms of colonialism, migration and tourism, whether as subjects in their own countries or as the expelled and transformed 'foreigner'. The stories are told untranslated, in their original language in order to underline the relationship between language and identity and confront the viewers with the linguistic barriers foreigners often have to face. The Romanians, Heidrun Holzfeind (Austria/USA 2002, video, 14 min) “The Romanians” Aurelia and Peter Plischa came to Austria in 1990 to escape the dictatorship in Romania. They discuss the current political and social situation in Romania and their life in Austria, their work at the local factory and their sorrows and dreams. Bosnia Hotel, Thomas Balmes (France 1996, video, 52 min) When warriors of the Samburu tribe in Kenya served in Bosnia as part of the U.N. peacekeeping forces, they found a world quite different from their pastoral existence in their homeland. They did not understand white man's civilization, “a place where people blow one another up with explosives without even seeing each other’s faces." Total running time: 89 minutes |
|
