Panorama
Night Will Fall Andre Singer
USA, UK, Israel, 2014 DCP, color / black-and-white, 85 min Director: Andre Singer Cinematography: Richard Blanshard Editing: Arik Lahav, Stephen Miller Sound: Aviv Aldema Music: Nicholas Singer Narrator: Helena Bonham Carter Production: Sally Angel for Angel TV, Brett Ratner for RatPac Co-Production: Cinephil, Final Cut for Real Executive Production: Richard Melman for Springfilms, Stephen Frears, James Packer World Sales/Screening Copy: Cinephil Involved TV Channels: Channel 4, ARD, NDR, ARTE, Channel 8, DR
Andre Singer:
World in Action (1978) Forbidden Rites (1999)
Awards: The Avner Shalev-Yad Vashem Chairman’s Award for Artistic Achievement in Holocaust-related Films Jerusalem Film Festival
In April 1945, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by British troops, and soldiers captured the liberation on film. They filmed the relief of the survivors, but also the terrifying reality of the camps, which were full to the brim with emaciated and dead prisoners. London-based producer Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock made it their mission to edit the many hours of material from several concentration camps into a cinematic whole: the resulting documentary was called German Concentration Camps. For the British government the film was a major asset, as it would serve as proof of the systematic atrocities of the Nazi regime. But as the making of the film progressed, the political situation changed and fear started growing that showing the film would stand in the way of rebuilding Germany. In the end, Bernstein and Hitchcock’s five film reels were shelved. Recently, the Imperial War Museums decided to restore the film and to finish it. Night Will Fall tells the story behind the creation of the film. The calm voice-over and the stylized interviews with those who were there form a sharp contrast to the horror of Bernstein’s archive material. After 70 years, postwar generations finally have access to perhaps the most powerful and most gruesome film in the history of British cinema.
Olya’s Love Kirill Sakharnov
WORLD PREMIERE
Austria, Russia, 2014 DCP, color, 68 min Director: Kirill Sakharnov Cinematography: Kirill Sakharnov, Galiya Galeeva, Olya Kuracheva, Ksenia Sakharnova, Andrey Turusov Editing: Kirill Sakharnov, Max Kliewer Production: Ksenia Sakharnova for SugarDocs film production Executive Production: Vlad Ketkovich for Ethnogeographic Research Foundation, Filip Antoni Malinowski & Jürgen Karasek for Soleil Film World Sales: Sixpackfilm Screening Copy: Soleil Film
Kirill Sakharnov:
Moscow: Liverpool (2009) Stalin. Why Not? (2010) 5 minutes of Freedom (2012) Mamas, Kids and the Law (2013)
In Putin’s Russia, with two members of the political punk band Pussy Riot in prison and the Russian parliament adopting controversial anti-gay legislation, we follow enthusiastic twentysomething Olya in her unstinting struggle for equal rights for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people. She organizes exhibitions and coming-out events and demonstrates actively on the streets, often right on the front line between demonstrators, riot police and opponents. The film’s home-video style underlines the personal nature of this highly politicized issue. Olya learns to use the camera herself so she can film in the intimacy of her apartment – while her girlfriend is fitting a wall socket or they are talking with friends about having children. This private footage is interspersed with material shot by an external cameraman – often rough material from the street, just when something is happening: beatings not only during the demonstrations in front of the Duma, but also on the escalator in the metro, where women are attacked by members of an anti-gay group. By letting the camera into her life, Olya shows us what the price of standing up for your sexuality is in today’s Russia.
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