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Tagged: Film Festival

Old photograph of a boy, above it a rubber stamp.

Witnessing Witnessing – On the Role of Art and its Audience in Times of Violence

By Judith Sieber. With the thematic focus “Witnessing Witnessing”, the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) 2025 took up the question of second degree witnessing “to explore the role of witnesses today, how testimonies – like statements, documents, individual objects or entire archives – shape our view of the world and how they can influence political reality.” This text is not a review of the festival – both the plurality of approaches and the political discussions that took place were far too complex. Rather, it is an attempt to think along the line of three of the films shown and to try to explore the meaning of witnessing in the current moment. The author takes a look at three films – “Das falsche Wort” (English The Lie, 1987) by Katrin Seybold and Melanie Spitta, “Empty Metal” (2018), a feature film directed by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer, and “Vents Violents” (Two letters to Chantal Akerman) from 2025.

Retrospective as a New Perspective: An Insight into the 4th Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin

With this year’s motto No Time Like Home (Дім в часі in Ukrainian), the fourth edition of the Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin took place from the 25th to 29th October. Having screened a total of 19 short films, ten recent full-length films and three additional films in the Retrospective programme, as well as three recent Georgian films, across five different cinemas, the festival proved to be a growing success in Berlin’s cultural landscape. A review by Oleksii Isakov.