The Radical Film Network Meeting Berlin is organized by the two filmmakers and artists Julia Lazarus and Ursula Böckler in cooperation with the Harun Farocki Institute. The event took place from 2 to 5 May 2019 at the Silent Green Kulturquartier Berlin.
The intention is to initiate exchange and dialogue between actors of the Radical Film Network, Berlin filmmakers and cultural practitioners. Furthermore it intends to foster and continue the British-German dialogue, currently aggravated by the political upheaval of Brexit. It will focus on artistic/creative and political/ethical positions within the global radical film cultures and video activism movements.
In the tradition of the network, an Open Call was published at the beginning of 2019. Only a small part of the entries could be considered, including contributions from individuals and communities, artists, activists, filmmakers, researchers and scientists from Germany, Great Britain, France, Austria, Brazil, Portugal, Egypt, China, Tunisia. They all have in common to seek answers to the questions: “What is radical film?” and “What is radical film able to achieve?”
The Radical Film Network Meeting Berlin was made possible with the kind support of: Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe Berlin
Since its founding in September 2015, the Harun Farocki Institut has worked as a platform for research into Farocki’s visual and discursive practice and as a flexible structure for new projects that analyze past, present, and future visual cultures. The small office in the Silent Green Kulturquartier forms the base station of the institute. The foundation of the HaFI is linked to the goal of developing forms of theoretical and visual work that connect with Harun Farocki’s thinking and cinematic practice in order to continue from there. The principles and procedures of essay film, Marxist image analysis, the activation of images for genuine visual research, the literacy of cinematic seeing, the analysis of subjectivation in technical-military dispositives or the critique of the production conditions of film, television and other visual industries form the basis on which the HaFI conceives and carries out its own projects.
Silent Green Kulturquartier is a new venue and an independent project that has found a unique home in Berlin in the historic premises of the former Wedding Crematorium. Founded in 2013, it is privately owned and sees itself as a protected space in which to think, research and experiment. The focus is on interdisciplinary work: The boundaries of individual artistic disciplines are to be shifted in order to link them into new, hybrid forms.
