In August 2020, we invited video artists from Canada and Germany to submit their ideas on the topic "The City in Times of the Virus": Will nature reconquer the inner cities? How do social rules and medical hygiene rules affect our bodies? How will we move in the urban space? How will we interact in the era of social distancing? - The eight selected videos will be projected after dark onto screens placed in the storefront windows of the Goethe-Institut Montreal on Boulevard St. Laurent until March 2021.
Documentation Report (No. 0617 - 0918)
Directed by Beatrice Schuett Moumdjian
About the film
Documentation Report is a continuous series of short episode like film sequences. The protagonist is a woman, whose head resembles a surveillance camera. Through this prosthesis she becomes a surveying entity herself. In the different episodes she is observed as she walks through nearly empty streets in formerly communist cities and looks at surveillance cameras and is looked at by them. Often these cameras are located in the vicinity of buildings that are of importance in society, for example the federal intelligence agency in Berlin or the National Cultural Palace in Sofia.
The filmmaker has personal connections to all places, where she and her cinematographer Lars Preisser have filmed. For instance, she was born before the fall of the Berlin wall in Sofia during the socialist regime, and has now many years later filmed/observed in the same street, where she once has lived.
Her family, like many people during socialism, has been affected by state surveillance, which is a detail she only knows little about.
About Beatrice Schuett Moumdjian
*1986 in Sofia, People's Republic of Bulgaria to Armenian family, 1990 emigration to Berlin, Germany.Education 2013 – 2020 at the art academies in The Hague (NL), Weimar and Leipzig (DE). M.F.A. in Media Art and Photography in 2020 at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Beatrice’s recent exhibition participations include Gegenwarten/Presences in Chemnitz and Art in the Underground at nGbK Berlin. Her project „International Bun“ was shortlisted in 2020 in the competition Kunst im Stadtraum – Karl Marx Allee by the Berlin Senate. Screenings internationally, e.g. LUFF in 2019 and Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival in 2018.
Jury statement
Documentation, Observation, Surveillance. Monitoring public spaces, buildings, people. Beatrice Moumdjian visits empty urban spaces where cameras are looking into the void that is left behind the people that are in lockdown. What are they looking at, when everybody is at home? (Peter Haueis)
Back
