Film Season “BE Longing”
A story about re-discovering one’s past and building a future together.
Parvis, the son of exiled Iranians, copes with life in his small hometown by indulging himself with pop culture, Grindr dates, and raves. After being caught shoplifting, he is sentenced to community service at a refugee shelter where he meets siblings Banafshe and Amon, who have fled Iran. As a romantic attraction between Parvis and Amon grows, the fragile relationship between the three is put to a test. They find and lose each other throughout a summer of fleeting youth, an intense first love, an attempt at a joint future, as well as the stark realisation that, in Germany, they are not equal.
Diecotrs Statement: We are moving. We are asked, where we come from. How long we have been here. Our stories and those of our parents are told as migration. But between terms like integration comedies or family dramas they are often reduced: to punchlines of multicultural reconciliation or romantic visions of a threatened homeland.
We meet. Two generations of the same age meet. This story tells of those, who grow up first generation in Germany. Of their disorientation and their parents’ attempt to format a history on VHS tapes. And it tells of those, who are just now coming to Germany. They document their movements in real time, and show their participation in digital forms. We’re losing our way. Lost, trying to determine new forms of communities. Lost, in a first, big love. We envision an utopia: One of shared nearness, where encounters are neither generalized nor problematized. This autobiographical feature film is based on the experiences of his director, who lives second generation in Germany as a queer person of colour. We take off. We indulge in aggressive pop, one that gives the story a current look and sound. One that lets us pause for a moment, only to accelerate again, and that refers to a world, that we all feel connected to.
Angelika Nguyễn‘s 1991 documentary film BRUDERLAND IST ABGEBRANNT portrays the airport, now already a relic, as a discourteous heterotopia, where Vietnamese workers are given a terse farewell as compensation for building the economy of the former East Berlin. More than just a document, the film is a testimony to the reprehensible treatment of Vietnamese guest workers. Having endured abuse, violent attacks, forced abortions and appalling living conditions, the workers were left without employment once the agreements signed by the reunified Socialist Republic of Vietnam and East Germany became null and void post-reunification. The film depicts life both inside and outside the worker dormitories, with the most persuasive scenes shot inside the airport. German bureaucracy is revealed to be sadly incompetent in performing a respectful valediction to the departing comrades. (Source: Fiktionsbescheinigung - Karina Griffith)
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