Was anderes machen (The Home and the Movie): Atteyat El Abnoudy: Iqa' al-haya (Rhythm of Life)

silent green presents

With the festival Was anderes machen (The Home and the Movie), silent green 2023 takes the archive of Das Kleine Fernsehspiel as the starting point for a historical retrospective, a description of the state and the question of the future of auteur film with events, an exhibition and a symposium. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the ZDF editorial office and the Arsenal Archive, television and film heritage will be commemorated together for the first time.
 

IQA' AL-HAYA (Rhythm of Life), Atteyat El Abnoudy, 1988, 58’
Lebenszyklus [Life cycle] is the German title of the film by Atteyat El Abnoudy, which was shown as a co-production with the Kleines Fernsehspiel on ZDF at the end of December 1988. "Lebenszyklus", according to the text for the film at the time, "shows what dignity manual labour can have: shaping mud bricks, firing pots, separating grain from chaff, pressing oil under huge millstones, drawing water from canals, spinning yarn, weaving on simple homemade looms." But the great Egyptian documentarian El Abnoudy skilfully and subtly subverts the tendency towards nostalgia in her work by showing that this work is now almost exclusively done by women and older men, while the young men aspire to better professions or to go abroad.

From today's perspective, completely different questions arise when the potter laconically states that water from the clay jug tastes much better than in plastic bottles from the fridge. Is the brute force industrialisation imposed by the Western nations actually meaningful in every case, and has it really fulfilled the promise of a better, self-determined life for the population of the South, especially for women?

Guests: Tamer El Said (Cimatheque Cairo) among others.

Film screening and discussion
Thursday, June 15
Start: 5.30 pm
Kino Arsenal
Tickets

Was anderes machen (The Home and the Movie) is a project of silent green Film Feld Forschung gGmbH in cooperation with Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art and Film Studies/Media Dramaturgy at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. With the kind support of the ZDF editorial department Das kleine Fernsehspiel. Supported by Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin. Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.