There’s a lot going on, as always, in European politics. Germany has proposed an “integration law” to be enacted later this month. Lutz Bachmann has provisionally been found guilty of inciting the people, a verdict many thought would not materialize and which has yet to be enacted. Austria has elected a far-right chancellor after Werner Faymann, Angela Merkel’s right hand man who helped open the borders last September, abruptly resigned. In Idomeni, tear gas was used against refugees trying to push a train through a border fence. Thousands are still trapped in Greece, and more arrive in Italy daily. Dr. Frauke Petry keeps talking.
But there are some amazing pieces of work being produced in these times.
These two German audio documentaries have given me much to think about in the past week. Anna Frenyo produced this documentary called “The Fence” for SWR last December. In it, she goes deep into the supply lines and politics of construction that led to the construction of a border fence between Hungary and Serbia last fall.
This radio documentary produced for ARD by Thomas Gaevert, which was produced last September, is called “Wer ist das Volk?” or “Who is the people?” Through interviews with former East German guestworkers, primarily from Vietnam and Mozambique, he seeks to find historical continuity between the rhetoric used in the former East to describe foreign workers and the persistence of this rhetoric about foreigners in the paroles of the PEGIDA movement.
The folks at wirmachendas.jetzt have such an impressive array of projects that one can get lost in their mix of reportage, reviews and services. The website has an English tab, and one of the aesthetic projects that is highly innovative is the Syrian Mobile Films Festival, which recently had a screening in BOX.Freiraum in Berlin. Building on the use of mobile phone cameras in the Arab protest movements, the Syrian Mobile Films Festival moves throughout Syria and other locations to encourage professional directors and amateurs to make low-budget films with phones. This group also offers the “pixel” training program for emerging young directors through grants and awards.
The mission statement of the SMFF states that it “seeks to present free and different cinematic vision, a vision believes that the higher accuracy image is not necessarily the most clearness one.”
Finally, Idil Baydar has written this piece for ZEIT MAGAZIN, the glossy magazine of the weekly politics and arts newspaper Die Zeit. In it, she performs the code-switching which made her famous as the character Jilet Ayse, whom I blogged about here.
My dream is that we stop blowing smoke. Instead we should finally show young people more respect, recognition and attention. That’s what we call empowerment, it’s real cool, but most Germans don’t know about it. Valla haram Almanya, I swear, that’s not cool, Germany!
She also distinguishes between the freedom of speech and crossing the line to impose discriminatory rule:
You get it? You don’t get nothing? The Jilet in me would say: ok, I’m talking slowly and clearly with you. Pegida can walk to Germania and back, but please, please don’t determine how we, the majority in this beautiful country, should live with each other. Germany, you’re doing AfD, upper limit and stuff. I have solution! We make with you welcoming-kültür workshop, totally da bomb, valla! Chill your life, Germany! Then you be ok, too.