Plantain
There is a Crack in the House of History
World Premiere of PLANTAIN | SPITZWEGERICH on Monday, February 19, 2018 at Kino Babylon in Berlin
In the frame of the Berlin Independent Film Festival 2018 February 14 – 20, 2018
PLANTAIN is a feature film by the performance artists Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes.
Starting from their private family story, they embarked in May 2015 on a month-long performance walk from Germany through Poland to the Russian region of Kaliningrad, to perform and film on location of true events of post-WWII displacements. In 7 episodes, this resulting feature film recalls members of Verena’s family, to look into time, mystery, war, duty, courage, trauma and fidelity.
They questioned through performance art how past and present speak to and through their bodies facing ethical, social and existential challenges. Teetering between the real, the visionary, and the changing contours of the memories of many, the film features them in a sequence of moving images through the process of acceptance of history and its individual and collective archiving. Their performative actions evolved in direct response to the surroundings and objects they found along the way. In order to facilitate a contemporary discourse on the past to understand the present, for them it became necessary to connect lapses and gaps, be they real or fictional. The process of recalling the unsaid, puzzling pieces together, digging dust away, imagining possible worlds whilst mapping impossible ones, opened closed boxes and questioned their insides: the dematerialisation of a German past, where oblivion reigns above nostalgia.
Monday, February 19, 2018 – 10 pm
Kino Babylon, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30
A film by and with VestAndPage
With Verena Stenke, Andrea Pagnes, Stephan Knies, Vlada Smirnova
Camera | Voice | Editing | Writing Verena Stenke, Andrea Pagnes
Production Audio | Sound Editing Douglas Quin
Sound Design Keller McDivitt
Original Music by Andreas Bauer, Katarina & Ljubica Duo, Stephan Knies, Josephine Macri, Mauro Sambo, Angie Seah and White Noise Generator
Month-long performance on behalf of Centre for Cultural Heritage of East Prussia
A project funded by BKM – Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media
In cooperation with Heart of the City Bureau Kaliningrad, Dom Samok Foundation Chernyakhovsk, Georgenburg Association Mayovka