This year’s trailer for the Oldenburg Film Festival took inspiration from La Jetée to craft a tale of human resilience in the face of A.I. homogeneity. It invited attendees to ‘Find Your Wild’ in the face of the processed content machines of the film industry.
Perhaps ironically, one of the most experimental pieces in the festival line-up this year utilised A.I. for it’s visuals. Edgar Pera’s hypnotic epistolary essay film, Telepathic Letters, created new universes through which two of the director’s favourite authors, Fernando Pessoa and H.P. Lovecraft could commune. However, far from machine-produced fare, Pera’s film bore the undeniable hallmarks of its human creator and subjects, something that resonated throughout the programme. Something that is perhaps inevitable for a festival like this, which takes a boutique and personal approach to curating a programme of genuinely independent work from around the globe
Founded over three decades ago by Torsten Neumann, who remains its avuncular host to this day, the festival has a reputation for showcasing rock’n’roll indie cinema that challenges social mores and cinematic conventions with aplomb and gives a platform to new genre work that might be overlooked elsewhere on the circuit. This edition was no exception, with its central must-attend event of the weekend being the cult-movie mashup, One-Way Ticket to the Other Side. A live musical performance by the Belgian Cold Wave/Electro Rock duo Severine Cayron and Jerome Vandewattyne, better known as Pornographie Excusive. A feature film featuring shorts by various Oldenburg alums – the aforementioned Edgar Pera, Douglas Buck, Jen Gatien, Katsuki Kurotanagi, and Martina Shone Radunksi, amongst others – embedded in a Trash-Humpers-esque framing narrative. If that wasn’t all punk enough, the screening took place in the rarified confines of the city’s beautiful Staatstheater.
But daring didn’t just come in the form of Oldenburg’s playful presentation, but also in the films themselves. At the awards ceremony on Sunday evening, Martina Shone Radunski and Lana Cooper’s new feature Ascent – Flieg Steil won the festival’s trademark award for audacity for its genre-blending look at politics and radicalism in the Berlin underground scene. It was far from the only film that could lay claim to such an award, with Nicolai Schumann’s one-man-show featuring an audacious central performance from Edward Hogg as a man trapped in a concrete box, The Lonely Musketeer, a real highlight, while Max Train’s James, a unconventional noirish comedy caper about a legendary bicycle scooped the festival’s overall Best Film award, on audience votes.
That audience was in impressive attendance throughout, with one screening of Santiago Mohar Volkow’s glorious satirical farce A History of Love and War so packed out that the auditorium had to be furnished with additional chairs and people stood in at the back and in the aisles. Mohar Volkow took a photograph of the gathered crowd, sure that his producer wouldn’t believe him if he described the scene. A History of Love and War also took home a trophy, winning the award for the ‘Spirit of Cinema’. It was part of a strong Latin-American showing alongside Camila Beltran’s arresting genre-inflected coming-of-ager Mi Bestia, and short film awardee Nostalgia of a (Still) Alive Heart from Diego Gaxiola.
Equally well attended were the festival’s two sidebars. The retrospective strand featured a selection of films by German genre specialist Dominik Graf, and the Saturday night show of the director’s cut of his 1994 crime thriller Die Sieger played to a packed house, with many viewers revisiting the film for the second or third time. The festival’s ‘tribute’ strand paid homage to two artists from Myanmar who are currently in exile after the military coup and trying to use cinema to raise awareness – Na Gyi and Paing Phyo Thu. The festival’s desire to highlight their plight, and also raise funds for their filmmaking charity, was just another example of Oldenburg’s commitment to supporting independent filmmakers, no matter the situation.
This spirit came up at various points throughout the festival, with many creators echoing the sentiments of Truman Kewley in the article we published during the festival. Whether speaking to filmmakers in person, hearing them discuss during their post-screening Q&As, or on stage when collecting their awards, the sense of community and support they felt both in being selected by Oldenburg and then their experience of being here was palpable. In terms of the festival circuit, it might seem like an outlier, but its ethos is evidently central to cultivating new talent and pushing boundaries. Long may it continue.
