07.04.2016 – 20:30

Presentation of the project, film screening.

EUROPOLY

Films exploring Europe in times of transformation

A line of workers offering their labour, a food laboratory in Warsaw, a transit village in Ireland, downtown Amsterdam on Sunday: our films are shown at these and other venues and turn them into agents. EUROPOLY has invited directors and artists – actors, musicians, activists, writers – from European countries to feel out the transformations undergone by the old continent since the debt crisis. The resultant short films are radically personal and direct our attention to details: where the changes can be seen and how they affect individuals.

The filmmakers come from the countries in which the films were shot. Their artistic counterparts are at home where statistical surveys locate the extreme other. Together, filmmakers and actors, have carried out research, listened to
stories and developed their observations into screenplays. And they have chosen their cinematic form: documentary, fiction, hybrid. One film portrays people living along a London canal where the corpse of an Eastern European woman
was washed up. Why are there so many dogs in France? We can draw inferences from the nightmare of a woman – in a film shot in a Paris studio. The north coast of Denmark was turned into a backdrop for a village consisting of paper houses, the homes of castaways. In a photo studio in Vilnius we hear possible responses to the phenomenon that in Lithuania there are many more women in leadership positions than in Denmark.

The project participants have chosen different forms of collaboration, before and behind the camera. Yes, there will even be singing: the Eurovision Song Contest with its eternal winners and tragic losers will not be missing.

Curator

: Dorothee Wenner

Producer

: Meike Martens (producer)

Detlef Gericke

is director of the Goethe-Institute Lithuania since February 2015. In his former post he was director of the Goethe-Instituts Boston, worked for the Goethe-Instituts in Sweden, the Goethe-Instituts in Indonesia and as head of Goethe-Instituts’ division for film and television in Munich.