umsonst

Unannounced, Aziza is once again standing in her room – internship, Portugal, everything canceled. But her room is occupied. Her mother, Trixi, has rented it out. Zach lives there now, a twenty-something from New Zealand, who came to Germany on a one-way ticket. Starting from this situation, the film develops an almost documentary-style portrait of a Kreuzberg ‘situation’: everything is readily available, time, people, summer, streets. And in the end a crash, the film itself: ‘for nothing’?

Clustering together in a neighborhood, sitting on the street doing nothing or very little, does this have a method? Is there something ‘meant’ by the Kreuzkölln situation of sitting-in-the-sun, using the streets like a bar, and singing on the streets - even if no one is even trying to ‘mean’ or ‘say’ anything? And yet: this use of the city, persisting on getting by without money, insisting on having time, this ‘demonstrates’ something. And what if it were just a way of reacting to the word ‘crisis’? To film the condition and to capture a story in it. People that live here, others that have joined them, stay for an undetermined time, leave, interrupt, also just to end this story altogether. (Stephan Geene)

Stephan Geene is an artist, umsonst is his second feature-length film after AFTER EFFECT (2008). Alongside theatrical works with minimal club and above all film works in various exhibition contexts (including with Judith Hopf), he works with the collective b_books (bookshop, publisher, events space, and film production), as a theorist and translator (of Jacques Derrida, Maurizio Lazzarato, Beatriz Preciado und Jacques Rancière). Most recent publication: Film Avantgarde Biopolitik (co-edited with Sabeth Buchmann and Helmut Draxler), Vienna 2009.