Workshop report

With: Anke Wilkening (Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf)
 

In 1982, Chetna Vora, an Indian student of film direction in the GDR, acted quickly to save the rough cut of her documentary film ‘Frauen in Berlin’ (Women in Berlin). It features interviews with women of different generations who talk about their private and professional experiences. After an internal university screening, Vora was asked to shorten her 140-minute version to 30 minutes. She was able to smuggle the 16mm material out of the HFF and take it to Berlin, where she copied it using a 16mm film projector and a video camera, before the university discovered that the material was missing.

Today, this video copy is the only known version of Vora’s rough cut. Only long after the fall of the Berlin Wall was there a public screening. The imperfections of the video technology at the time and the hastily constructed set-up have become part of the film’s reception. In contrast, 23 minutes have been preserved from the original reversal film, a radical cut for broadcast purposes that was ultimately not aired. How would a concept for the restoration of this unfinished work look? How should the aesthetics and editing of the original be defined, and what role does the reception of the work play in this? ‘Frauen in Berlin’ was Vora’s graduation film project. What place does the film occupy in the overall oeuvre of the director, who died in 1987?

In German