Der Fremde Donner + Vom Zusehen beim Sterben

Der Fremde Donner (The Foreign Thunder)
Pascal Hoffmann, 1984, Drama, 24 min. German with English subtitles

Vom Zusehen beim Sterben (Watching While Dying) 
Dorothee Schön, Hubertus Meyer-Burckhardt, 1983, 41 min. German with English subtitles

Followed by a talk with Sun-Ju Choi, Feng-Mei Heberer, and Yi Lou.

Crossing Borders with Camera Forward presents hidden gems from the student film archive at the University of Television and Film Munich (HFF München). Featuring newly restored graduation films from the 1980s, the program explores how German film students navigated shifting racial and cultural imaginaries as the Cold War was drawing to a close. Central to the selection is the unexpected presence of imagined Asia and “Asianness”, at times full-frontal, at times as easy-to-miss or ephemeral traces. In the sci-fi-ish Der Fremde Donner, Asia appears in fantasies of extraterrestrial life while also destabilizing Western ideals of rational enlightenment. The expressionist docu-fiction Vom Zusehen beim Sterben confronts West German anxieties about borders, displacement, and national identity through its incorporation of footage of “boat people” arriving on the Cap Anamur. We treat this newly discovered film archive as a springboard to raise questions around voice, perspective, and preservation, and as a means to critically reflect on our current moment of continuous and newly emerging anti-immigration realities.

The digital restoration of the two films is brought to you by the HFF Film Heritage Project, run by the CreatiF Center at HFF München.

 Sun-Ju Choi works as a curator and writer. As a board member of “Vielfalt in Film e.V.,” she advocates for greater diversity and intersectionality in film. She is a co-writer of the film “Staatsschutz”, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival 2026.

Feng-Mei Heberer is a film and media studies scholar at The University of Hong Kong. Her work explores media, migration, and racialized gender and labor regimes. She is the author of Asians on Demand (2023) and active in community film curation.

Yi Lou is a film scholar working at the CreatiF Center of the University of Television and Film Munich (HFF München), where she leads the funded project “HFF Film Heritage”, oversees the film archive, and delivers lectures on film heritage studies and audiovisual archiving. She is the author of The Return of Magic: The Transformation of the Body in Chinese Cinema and Its Cultural Memory.