Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers by Pamela Cohn

Author:Pamela Cohn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: ART057000
ISBN: 9781682192351
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

KARIM AÏNOUZ

I first met Karim Aïnouz in 2010, the year I moved to Berlin. The Brazilian-born writer–director has also made his home there although he’s constantly traveling the world to make his films. I was familiar with Karim’s name since he’s directed over twenty films in a career spanning almost thirty years and I’d been deeply impressed with his first feature drama Madame Satã (2002), but seeing I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You made me a die-hard fan. It encompassed everything everyone around me kept going on and on about: breaking free of the bounds of genre and form in order to create distinct and transcendent cinematic work.

As a film director Karim Aïnouz remains hard to define. He rejects the notion of having created a body of work. Even though he’s been directing big productions for decades, on 16 mm and 35 mm film, in 2018 he made his first feature documentary on HD video, Zentralflughafen THF (Central Airport THF). The story takes place mostly within the confines of the hangars at the Berlin Tempelhof Airport. Unlike most urban airports built many kilometers from the city center, the Tempelhof grounds sit in the midst of a residential neighborhood.

Tempelhof was one of the first airports in Berlin, designated as such by the Ministry of Transport in 1923. In the mid-1930s, the Nazi government began reconstruction of the main terminal, one of the largest structures in the world at the time. Upon its permanent closure in 2008, the citizenry of Berlin petitioned to have it reopened as a public-access leisure space, known as Tempelhofer Field, a huge expanse of grass and concrete for picnicking, bike riding, kite flying, and barbequing. Karim had begun filming a project at Tempelhof based around this transformation when part of the property became a refugee center for the tens of thousands of people pouring into Germany. These displaced persons were coming from Syria, Ukraine, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Yemen, and several other places on the planet. Climate change, genocide, war, and other catastrophic events and human rights abuses have caused traumatized populations to flee, attempting to find refuge in an increasingly inhospitable Europe. Germany is one of the few countries to accept such a robust number of asylum seekers, and it’s changing the fabric of German society very quickly.

With the massive refugee crisis swelling to epic proportions in 2015, the airport’s hangars—used for concerts, fashion shows, and other events—were retrofitted as an emergency shelter that provided temporary housing, food, medical care, psychological counseling, immersion language courses in German, and a place to wait while an overburdened foreign office grants permission for individuals and families to stay. Asylum seekers are given resources for what they need to run the gauntlet of getting papers, but it can be random in terms of how long that takes—anywhere from several months to several years.

With a haunting score by Benedikt Schiefer, superb cinematography by Juan Sarmiento, and flawless editing by Felix von Boehm,

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