Fringe! & I'm With You Present: Liz Rosenfeld - The Surface Tension Trilogy

About

Dir Liz Rosenfeld / Germany / 2014 / 65min
UK Premiere
Prod. NowMomentNow
Distribution Video Data Bank

The Surface Tension Series is a trilogy which embraces anachronistic strategies of storytelling, filtering history through the lens of queer experience and relationships in present-day Berlin. The work questions the reliability and usefulness of nostalgia and of re-enactment, as well as examining the means by which radical personal history is made. The films are structured through artists representing artists over a chronological gap bridged by an uneasy mutual concern with creative and political precarity. These films explore not only the romance, hedonism, and expression of queer sexuality preceding one of history's most terrifying shifts, but also chronicle my past seven years in Berlin, portraying the experiences of a small and evolving queer artistic community.

Frida & Anita (2011)
A glimpse into 1920s Berlin through an imagined one night stand between the queer chanteuse, Anita Berber, and Frida Kahlo.

Höch (2013)
Set in East Berlin in 1977, this short experimental documentary interviews the Dadaist Artist Hannah Höch as she reflects upon her experiences living and working during part of the 1920's in Berlin. Höch compares the socio - political landscape of Berlin in the 1970's to it's romanticized past of the Wiemar Era, while questioning the usefulness of nostalgia as an emotive tool.

Die Neue Frau (2014)
Presented as a reel constructed of personal home movies made by Leni Riefenstahl in 1933 (the last official year of The Weimar Republic), Die Neue Frau exposes an ambiguous relationship she had with Eva Braun.

In conversation with the screening, IWY has curated intimate performance encounters. Artists Peter Cant & Krzysztof Honowski, Eirini Kartsaki and Owen Parry create an atmosphere of participation and conversation to complement the ethos of collectivity and critical communities that Surface Tension exhibits.

Followed by a Q&A with Liz Rosenfeld

Presented in partnership with I'm With You.

Supported by Goethe Institute.