Spiralling

Studying film means grappling with expectations – your own and other people’s, real and imagined – and in the end it is a process of emancipation. The starting point for the program “Spiralling” was the question of how that reckoning shows up in more recent DFFB films: how student films respond aesthetically to an education whose promise of professionalization can also become an obstacle to originality and a spirit of experimentation. Films by Florinda Frisardi, Faraz Fesharaki / Moritz Friese, and Ewelina Rosińska, made between 2017 and 2025 at different stages of their studies, are preceded here by an early film by Raoul Peck, who finds the fulcrum of his critique in language. These films span a broad artistic range – one that opens up when filmmakers have the courage to question formal or ideological expectations.

Leugt

FRG 1983, directed by Raoul Peck, DCP, 13 min, German original version with English subtitles

“Vowels, consonants, pauses, punctuation are merely forming sequences of sounds and non-sounds, from which we, the masses, thanks to centuries of systematic political education are still able to distill intonations and stresses, so that despite ‘not having a clue what the guy has just said or what he’s talking about in the first place’ we are able to applaud when expected.” (Raoul Peck – from a project exposé for “Leugt”, May 1983)

Reigen (Round Dance)

Germany 2025, directed by Florinda Frisardi, DCP, 6 min, German original version with English subtitles

A blazing drama of jealousy plays out in an underground parking garage, told in a single continuous shot. Tropes of popular narrative cinema that seem familiar at first are thrown off balance by a narrative loop. A moving-image trompe l’oeil that leaves a lasting impression.

It’s a criminal waste to give this film a postproduction

Germany/Iran 2017, directed by Faraz Fesharaki, Moritz Friese, DCP, 20 min, Farsi and German original version with English subtitles

On a film set: director Faraz wants to shoot a scene in which he has a video call with his parents. The conversation has barely begun when his father, above all, starts questioning the scripted dialogue. The everyday setting of a Zoom call sabotages the ambitions of the feature-film production apparatus.

Ashes by name is man

Germany 2023, directed by Ewelina Rosińska, shot on 16mm, DCP, 20 min, no dialogue

Ewelina Rosińska shot her graduation film on a 16mm film in the cultivated landscapes around Kraków and Lviv, portraying her grandparents’ everyday life and, with it, a rural way of living shaped by Catholicism. “In the writings of my favorite painter I read that, for him, the Polish landscape seems to draw the gaze constantly downward, leading us to look not past the horizon but beneath our feet, at the bones buried under every step.” (Ewelina Rosińska)

Guests: Florinda Frisardi, Sebastian Ladwig, Faraz Fesharaki (tbc), Moritz Friese, Ewelina Rosińska
Curated by Karina Griffith and Tobias Hering