lumbung Film: GDR International #2

This event is part of Meydan #2: next to the lumbung Film program, it includes a music program, a flea market, conversations, workshops, food and drinks.

lumbung Film: GDR International #2

Responding to the remarkable presence of archives as residues of parallel histories and networks of solidarity at documenta fifteen, GDR INTERNATIONAL reflects on how the internationalist agenda of Socialist East Germany (German Democratic Republic) affected the country’s film production and film politics.

In the Year of the Pig

dir. Emile de Antonio, USA 1968, 104 min, DCP, original version

A devastating indictment of the US intervention in Vietnam, analyzing its wider historical context and laying bare its racist foundations. The film combines archival footage meticulously raked from various sources with interviews Emile de Antonio filmed with a wide range of protagonists representing opposing views on the war. Being a radical, FBI-blacklisted filmmaker made de Antonio a prominent representative of “the other America”, a term used among GDR officials to refer to cultural institutions and individuals in the USA with whom collaboration was politically desirable.

From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, de Antonio was a regular visitor at the festival in Leipzig—where In the Year of the Pig picked up a Silver Dove Award in 1968—and he maintained a cooperative correspondence with Peter Ulbrich, whose Vietnam footage he was given access to when researching for In the Year of the Pig at the GDR State Film Archive.

lumbung Film: GDR International is curated by Tobias Hering.

Tobias Hering is a freelance curator living in Berlin and Mecklenburg, Germany. His work focuses on thematic film programs that deal with questions of image politics and the role of archives. Recent projects include Tell It to the Stones, an exhibition, program series, and retrospective on the work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub at the Akademie der Künste Berlin (2017, together with Annett Busch), The gatekeepers exist to be overthrown, a three-part homage to New York film curator Amos Vogel at the Arsenal cinema in Berlin (2021–2022), and several program series on migrant film work in East and West Germany for the Zeughauskino in Berlin, the Film Museum in Frankfurt, and the Short Film Festival in Hamburg, among others. Since 2011, Tobias Hering has been involved in the programming of the Kassel Dokfest. At the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, he is head of the archive-based section re-selected. He is co-editor of several anthologies, most recently Tell It to the Stones: Encounters with the Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (Sternberg Press, 2021, together with Annett Busch).

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