
Status and Terrain
Zustand und Gelände
DIRECTOR: Ute Adamczewski COUNTRY: Germany YEAR: 2019 LANGUAGE(S): German RUNNING TIME: 118 min
SECTION: Weekender 2020
INHALT
Ute Adamczewski’s documentary film tells the story of an escalation. The starting point of the film are the so-called wild concentration camps, which were set up immediately after the National Socialist seizure of power in March 1933 to eliminate political opponents and have largely been forgotten today. ZUSTAND UND GELÄNDE is about how these places have been overwritten by time and how different political cultures of remembrance have inscribed themselves in them. The film links three consecutive periods of German history into a loose narrative in which violence plays a key role in the assertion of power.
ZUSTAND UND GELÄNDE not only tells of places that became part of a network-like fascist infrastructure right at the beginning of National Socialism, but which later – after the Second World War, after the end of the GDR, in the all-German present of the NSU – became contested spaces for the interpretation of history and the legitimisation of political lines.
UTE ADAMCZEWSKI
Ute Adamczewski works as a video artist and filmmaker in Berlin. Her video installations have been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Shanghai Art Biennale and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, among others. Her most recent works Neue Ordnung (2013) and La Ville Radieuse Chinoise (2015) were co-produced by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Zustand und Gelände is her first documentary film and was honoured with the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig and the ver.di Solidarity Award.
FILMOGRAPHY
The Chinese Radiant City (2015), New Order (2013)
SCRIPT: Ute Adamczewski PRODUCER: Ute Adamczewsk CAMERA: Stefan Neuberger EDITOR: Ute Adamczewsk
GERMAN DISTRIBUTOR: Grandfilm