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Was bleibt | Šta ostaje | What remains / Re-visited

Forum 2020
© Clarissa Thieme
In 2008 und 2009, Clarissa Thieme travelled through Bosnia-Herzegovina and set up her camera in places where war crimes had taken place in the 1990s. Those trips resulted in the short film Was bleibt | Sta ostaje | What remains (Forum Expanded 2010). Now she returns to these locations and sets up her camera in precisely the same spots, with two women carrying a still from the first film into the frame as a kind of performative act. It’s a process as simple as it is clever, revealing similarities and differences between 2009 and 2019. A ruin has been torn down, a house has been given a new coat of paint, the place where a herd of sheep once huddled is now covered with scrub. At the same time, the poster arouses the curiosity of passers-by; they engage the director and her associates in conversation. Furthermore, this mini-performance starts up a kind of game: What can be seen when an image from the past blocks one’s view of the present, or only allows it to be glimpsed from the margins? Almost in passing, the film expands into a reflection on the question of what visible and invisible traces does a violent past leave behind on a landscape and in people’s memories.
by Clarissa Thieme Germany / Austria / Bosnia and Herzegovina 2020 Bosnian, English 70’ Colour World premiere | Documentary form

Crew

Director Clarissa Thieme
Cinematography Almir Đikoli
Editing Clarissa Thieme
Sound Design Christian Obermaier
Sound Samir Hrković
Assistant Director Emina Kujundzic
Production Manager Amira Lekić
Producer Caroline Kirberg
Executive Producer Caroline Kirberg
Co-Producer Christine A. Mayer

Produced by

Kirberg Motors

Clarissa Thieme

Born in Oldenburg, Germany in 1976. She studied Media Art, as well as Cultural Studies and Aesthetic Practice. Thieme works in the fields of film, photography, performance, installation and text, combining documentary and fictional forms with a focus on the processes of memory, identity politics and strategies of translation.

Filmography

2010 Was bleibt; 30 min., Forum Expanded 2010 · Was bleibt | Sta ostaje | What remains; 30 min., Forum Expanded 2010 2012 The Place We Left; 60 min. 2013 Resort; 15 min. 2016 Die DDR hat es nie gegeben / Appell; 4 min. 2018 Today is 11th June 1993; 15 min., Forum Expanded 2018 2019 Can't You See Them? – Repeat.; 8 min., Forum Expanded Exhibition 2019 · Can't You See Them? – Repeat.

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2020