Circa 106 – Screening Series “RE:COVERING HORIZONS” (Freefilmmakers Mariupol)

Screening Series “RE:COVERING HORIZONS”

Film Screening / 29.01.2023

Solidarity Screening for `Freefilmers Mariupol´
With direct fundraising and homemade vegan borsch

“Freefilmers is a collective of filmmakers and artists, originally from Mariupol, Ukraine. For the past five years, we have been working with topics of urban transformations in East Ukraine and its multicultural vibes. We have also researched the working-class creativity and industrial past and present of post-socialist cities.
“Our current projects focus on memories and archives beyond official historical narratives and gender violence in patriarchal capitalist society.”
(taken from their website help-freefilmers.network )

Recently many members are volunteering themselves in raising and transporting donation to Eastern Ukraine, which you can follow up on in their instagram profile https://www.instagram.com/freefilmers.ua/

It is both reassuring and frightening to consider that life doesn't stop when war is declared.
We can’t speak of a lack of coverage in the German media when it comes to the full-scale war on Ukraine. A relentless stream of images has been confronting us with their realities, and importantly so – however, these images are framed from, if not also taken, a non-Ukrainian perspective and often focus on aerial overviews, things lost or buried. Even though people are now more familiar with the country’s geography than ever, what they know is a land of rubble and red marks. Unimaginable yet now commonplace in its depictions, it is becoming a spectacle where individuals are still left to fend for their lives, 11 months after the sky was never closed.
Welcome to our screening series “RE:COVERING HORIZONS”, in which we aim to:
- give space to Ukrainian perspectives, feelings, as well as dialogues and non-Ukrainian perspectives linked to the topic of displacement, war and being “covered” by European media
- support Ukrainian culture, in opposition of Russia’s genocidal claims to destroy it entirely
- shed light on Ukrainian artists, now more at risk of precarity since the war, and to offer their works and reflections to a diverse audience
- bridge silences
- make space for the tangible, diverse, interconnected living that takes place in times of war

The series starts with a solidarity screening for “Freefilmers Mariupol” and the film “My favourite job”, a documentary on volunteer drivers, itself at the fringe of volunteering and “filmmaking”. The movie is a fragment of a larger project that aims to support volunteer activities by showing them in an understandable and graspable way, as well as showing the attempts at and impossibilities of bringing out a “clear perspective” to share.

As the director, Sashko Protyah, is mentioned saying in an interview with Спільне/Commons:
“In Izium, I happened to record a conversation with a woman who survived the five-month occupation. She described her experience as a movie. Talking to people from Mariupol who experienced the blockade, I also heard this comparison more than once. What does it mean when reality feels like cinema? What can working with cameras and editing mean in a life experienced as a movie?”

29.01.2023, 18 Uhr
Circa 106, Bismarckstraße 106, 28203 Bremen