Berlin Short Encounters: Time

Nurses and Nazis, syphilis and seduction: this experimental short delves into a scandalous urban legend from World War Two Czechoslovakia. Combining documentary footage with animation and excerpts from the history of cinema, “Black&White” deconstructs the ways stories about women are generally told and how they affect our unconscious perceptions.

Eluned Zoe Aiano is a filmmaker, editor and translator with a background in Visual Anthropology whose work is generally centred on Central/Eastern Europe. She is currently working on her first feature documentary in Serbia. She also writes about film and is a regular contributor to the East European Film Bulletin.

Anna Benner is an artist working across animation, drawing and installation. Her work deals with psychology and emotions, often using hand-drawn rotoscope animation. Her animated short films have screened worldwide and won prizes at international film festivals like Annecy, Encounters and Stuttgart Trickfilmfestival.

The images come without any warning. First a tingling in the neck, then the trembling spreads through Markus' whole body. The abuse happened over 45 years ago, but only now can Markus put it into words. With his motor home, the 55-year-old always keeps moving, just so he doesn't spend too long thinking. A daily struggle for survival between the past and the view of the ocean horizon.

Paul Scheufler was born in 1998 in Graz, Austria. During a Film & MultimediaArt education, he worked as an author & director on several fictional and documentary short films. He also performed regularly as an actor in Graz's Theater for Youth. His award-winning short film Taste of Love was screened internationally at more than 100 film festivals. Projects in Kenya and Vietnam were followed by a one-year residency in New York. In addition to a directing master class at the School of Visual Arts, he worked as an assistant to the curator at the Austrian American Short Film Festival, the American Jewish Committee, and on personal photographs and experimental films. Projects in the advertisement industry brought him back to Vienna. Since 2019 Paul Scheufler has been living in Berlin and studying directing at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf.

The film is based on a WhatsApp conversation with an ex-prisoner who served time in a Peruvian prison. The messages are brought to life by car mechanics whose regular job is to fix faulty or broken-down engines through the understanding and mastering of complex chains of interrelated components that are needed to make the bigger thing work; in the same way the film is constructed out of innumerable narrations and memories which initially were based on a single man’s life. The "actors" speak the prescribed text against the background of their own lives and thereby, always playing themselves. By allocating original texts to a diverse range of people and by shifting their spatial and temporal context, the filmmaker examines the tension between the staged and the documentary, the real and the imagined. Everyone becomes everyone else. The utopia of a shared memory is gleaned, perhaps.

*1988 (in Berlin), lives in Berlin
08/2009 - 09/2013 Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spanish Philology
since 10/2014 Weissensee Art Academy Berlin, Fine Arts / Sculpture
09/2019 - 07/2020 DAAD scholarship at the New Media Department of Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana

A late-summer morning in Wrangelkiez, Berlin, Elpi, a young Greek woman, receives a phone call from a long-lost friend. As the day progresses, Elpi’s apprehensive wait for their reunion interweaves with the lives of other neighbourhood locals. In the neighbourhood there is a lingering feeling of wanting to get back to something. But to where, to what, and to whom?

Elsa Rosengren was born in Gothenburg, Sweden on February 23, 1989. After working at sea in her early 20s, she started making films while attending Rhode Island School of Design, RI, USA. Elsa graduated from the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin in January 2020. She currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.