Concept

Dreams and Trauma

Moving Images and the Promised Lands

The role of film in the construction of the idea of Israel has emerged with a powerful and burgeoning presence in global cinematic and filmic discourse. The international film festival circuit has witnessed the establishment of a thriving new generation of filmmakers and experimental video artists from Israel and its occupied territories, whose works’ are producing a recognisable impact on the way in which moving images are perceived and decoded in a wider context. More specifically, the inclusion of these films and documentaries into the international arena of festivals, and further, their inclusion within international biennales, has subsequently, highlighted a historical period of almost six decades of vision as constructed narrative, an assembly of facts and fictions, of both psycho-geographical growth and eradication as captured by lens based media and translated into moving images. The history and tradition of filmmaking in this region indicates a traceable, even a consultative, evidence of the evolution of ideals which coincidently assist research into the physical evolution of modern Israel. These traces widely indicate an ontology, from its establishment in a period known historically as British Mandatory Palestine, which was rooted primarily in the production of documentaries that promoted the idea of the Jewish enterprise, moved through heroic films that captured the idea of men and women working together to create the notion of the utopian state, to later works that examined the contestations between Israeli Arabs / Israeli Jews /and immigrants of both Jewish and Arab descent. However, as current production indicates, themes concerning sub and counter cultures such as alternative sexualities, extremist groups, activists and the daily recordings of life, both rural and industrial, have become new premises of interest for the new generation of filmmakers and their audiences.

The House of World Culture recognises the importance of ideas that are rooted in domestic anxieties and is also concerned with the subversion of those hierarchies that are especially evident within the experimental video artists' works, whereby artists are seen to emancipate themselves from the so-called expected notions of culture which allow an access into the current zeitgeist beyond the clichéd and propagated news-related images that promote and sustain image fatigue. Accordingly, the forthcoming winter programme, Dreams and Trauma - Moving Images and the Promised Lands, proposes to project the multiple issues that are captured in the form of moving images by highly influential and experimental practitioners who are exercising an exciting and inventive idiom in filmmaking. The festival will be programmed using feature films, shorts, documentaries and experimental videos produced over the course of the last five years. In addition, key experts from the region, ranging from writers, filmmakers and curators, will be invited to take part in Question and Answer sessions with the Berlin audiences, providing an entry point for a dialogue to initiate a wider exchange of ideas about the concept of Israel and the Middle East as witnessed and appropriated through moving images.

The works that have been chosen for the programme have been thematically curated under the umbrella of the concept of nation building which reflects in parallel the position of the other as well as the sustained effects of occupation in relationship to the self. Under this umbrella the programme will explore, via the means of a research based lens, the themes that exist within its borders from the standpoint of close proximity. Through this detailed analysis into varied individual narratives and experimental works, the House of World Cultures invites its audiences to gain an entry into the realm of lens based media as it develops within the works of younger practitioners without compromising their individual aesthetic, intellectual and philosophical view points.