Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars + Devils on the doorstep

Sean Snyder: Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars

Documentary film, Germany 2004/5, 13 min, Engl. subtitles

A film essay about the consumption of goods and images as part of an ideological war – on all fronts: ‘In the end, the Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad, designed by a US architect, disappears in the orange-reddish colours of a bombing raid’, comments an impressed Radio Ö1.

American video-artist Sean Snyder (*1972) received the ARTE Prize at the international short-film festival in Oberhausen 2006 for his Deconstruction of Photojournalism.

Jiang Wen: Devils on the doorstep / Guaizi Lai Le

Feature film, China 2000, 140 min, Engl. subtitles

The winner of the Grand Prix in Cannes, banned from working for seven years. This is the situation that director Jiang Wen, one of the country’s best-known film actors, faced in 2000. With an oppressive mixture of the grotesque and total seriousness, his anti-war epic shows how the fear of the Japanese occupying forces, on the one hand, and the people’s ‘own’ underground fighters, on the other, drives an entire village insane. The censors found the film too vulgar …

Jiang Wen (*1963) was von Gong Li’s partner in Das rote Reisfeld.