Online Filmscreening and Film Talk
Filmscreening and Film Talk on the occasion of German Unity Day on 3 October 2021, presented in collaboration with the International Festival of Films on Art:
THE FORGOTTEN TREASURE
Director: Tom Ehrhardt
Documentary
Germany, Brazil | 2019 | 78 mins
Original version with English subtitles
A treasure is stored in a secret location in Brasilia: the largest private collection of non-conformist art from the GDR. Its collector, the Brazilian diplomat Chagas Freitas, is the key to an almost forgotten chapter of German history.
United in silent but stubborn resistance to the dictatorship and yet linked to it in passionate disloyalty, populated by highly qualified, introverted individualists - that describes the scene of non-conformist artists from the former GDR. At the time, 30 years ago, many experts had predicted a breakthrough for this scene, and yet these artists and their works never made it into the general public's field of vision: neither under socialism nor in reunified Germany.
Directed by Tom Ehrhardt, this documentary tells the story of a collector's attempt to preserve an important piece of German art history, but also of artists who struggled to work freely at a time when art was dominated by socialist realism and strictly controlled by the East German regime.
The film will be presented online for free and across Canada from October 1 to 10 on www.arts.film
Film talk - October 3, 2021
Online film talk with documentary filmmaker and director of The Forgotten Treasure, Tom Ehrhardt and media theorist Katharina Niemeyer (UQAM). Livestream online via Facebook Live October 3, 2021. More info to come.
Tom Ehrhardt is a German filmmaker and journalist born in 1978 in Berlin. After directing segments for the youth culture program “Tracks” (arte) from 2002 – 2008, he started producing music videos, stage visuals and short documentaries. In 2010 his first feature documentary “Last Year In Summer” premiered at the Babylon cinema in Berlin. He was a camera person on the documentary “Queercore” (2017, director: Yony Leyser) and finished his second doc feature „The Forgotten Treasure“ in 2019. Various activities and projects have taken him to Ethiopian coffee farms, the Brazilian rainforest and the shelf ice in Antarctica. Ehrhardt lives and works in Berlin, Germany and São Paulo, Brazil.
Filmography:
- Last Year in Summer (doc, 78 min., 2010, director, producer)
- The Forgotten Treasure (doc, 80 min, 2019, director, producer)
- Eletronica:Mentes (doc, 80 min, 2019, co-writer, co-producer)
Katharina Niemeyer is a media theorist, professor at the School of Media (Faculty of Communication) at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and director of CELAT-UQAM (research center Culture-Art-Society). Trained in cultural sciences, media archaeology and media philosophy at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Germany), as well as in communication sciences at the University of Lyon (France) and at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), her research focuses on the relationships between media and (digital) technologies, cultural memory and history. She is currently working on a project dealing with ‘online ostalgia’ and recently co-edited the book Contemporary Nostalgias: media, culture and technology (Nostalgies contemporaines : médias, cultures et technologies). She is a member of the editorial board of the journals MAST (Media Art Study and Theory) and Memory, Mind & Media (Cambridge University Press). Katharina Niemeyer is also council member of the International Association for Media and History and co-founder of the International Media and Nostalgia Network.
Personal website:
https://kniemeyer.net | Ostalgia project:
https://ostalgie.uqam.ca
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