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  5. Special Trains + Dark Figure + It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus + When the Androgynous Child

Special Trains + Dark Figure + It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus + When the Androgynous Child

OV with English subs
Followed by a talk with Dunkelfeld film collective, Kamal Al Jafari and Melina Pafundi

Specijalni Vlakovi
Special Trains
Krsto Papić, Yugoslavia 1972, 14 min.

Dunkelfeld
Dark Figure
Ole-Kristian Heyer/Patrick Lohse/Marian Mayland, Germany 2020, 16 min.

It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus
Kamal Al Jafari, Germany2019, 25 min.

Cuando el niño andrógino
When the Androgynous Child
Melina Pafundi, Germany/Argentina 2019, 9 min.

Institutional racism, bureaucratic violence and binary patterns of exclusion connect these four short films: It's a Long Way to Amphioxus leads us into the waiting rooms of Berlin’s migration office. An old woman leans in to a young man and asks, “what are they distributing here?” - “Numbers”, he replies. Likewise, when the Special Trains transporting “guest workers” arrived from ex-Yugoslavia to Munich in the 1970s, their names were replaced by numbers. In Dark Figure, which tackles the case of a house inhabited by migrant workers which was burnt down in Duisburg in 1984, the number of unreported racist crimes in Germany comes to light. Finally, When an Androgynous Childquestions the origins of binarity by contemplating notions of belonging.

Dunkelfeld film collective member’s Marian Mayland, Patrick Lohse and Ole-Kristian Heyer worked together for the first time on the short film Dunkelfeld (Dark Figure), where they combined their individual artistic approaches: experience in dealing with documentary forms, questioning common narratives in society and ways of functioning in visual media.

Kamal Al Jafari is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist. His work has been shown worldwide at film festivals such as the Berlinale, Locarno, Viennale and Rotterdam and museums such as the MoMA and Tate Modern. In 2021 he was a jury member for the Leopard of tomorrow section of the 74th Locarno Film Festival and a jury member for the Burning Lights Competition of Visions du Réel, Nyon.

Melina Pafundi (1987) Mar del Plata, Argentina. She studied Film and Video direction, Philosophy and Fine Arts. She has worked as a film archive restorer at the Buenos Aires Film Museum, Pablo C. Ducrós Hicken. Since 2016 lives in Berlin, and she has worked with the director Franz Müller as an Assistant Director and is member of the film laboratory directed by artists LaborBerlin e.V.