Olingo
Emile Itolo, German Democratic Republic, 35 mm, b/w, 11′, 1966, 11 min. German with English subtitles

OYOYO
Chetna Vora, Film and Television Academy of the GDR, 1980, 68 min. German with English subtitles.
Digitisation and restoration of the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, supported by the Film Heritage Funding Programme, financed by BKM, Länder and FFA

Followed by a talk with Can Sungu, Dieu Hao Do (BAFNET) Mmakgosi Kgabi

On 3. October, the day of so-called German Unity, we present two migrant perspectives from the GDR that have seldom been present in the country's public discourse. By bringing together largely unknown films by foreign students and filmmakers of color, a space is created for unusual cinematic perspectives that have received virtually no attention in Germany's film historiography to date.

Emile Itolo’s Olingo is a film about an African student looking for an apartment who is repeatedly shunned for patently racist motives. Indian film-maker Chetna Vora came to the Film and Television Academy of the GDR in Babelsberg, Potsdam in 1976 to study directing. Oyoyo was filmed in a student residence in Karlshorst, Berlin with a focus on students who came to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from Chile, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, the Mongolian Soviet Republic, and other countries. In this student environment, Vora captures a community that shares a transnational space shaped not only by many languages and intimate conversations, but by music and dance. A song in the film by Os Tubarões in Cape Verdean Creole, whose chorus gives the film its title, warns against ‘working too much for others’ and instead brings the students together in a moment that celebrates friendship, solidarity, and conviviality. (CS)