Born out of an immersive workshop with secondary school classes in Berlin which centered around the pressing topic of climate change and its impact on the ocean, this collective film shoot captures a distinct essence of a generation caught amidst a profound state of transition. The fragmented nature of the film serves as a mirror to the turbulent experiences of the young adults, aged around 15 years old, as they navigate the complexities of their existence, offering a unique glimpse into their hopes, fears, and aspirations in grappling with the complexities of our time. The film incorporates a diverse range of sounds and moods, seamlessly merging the concrete realities of Berlin with the abstract realms of association connected to the vastness of the sea.

Taking its title from a man made radioactive element on the periodic table, AMERCIUM addresses the literal contamination of sacred lands and the spiritual neglect of an American landscape. The film revolves around the contested long term nuclear storage facility of Yucca Mountain using portraits of individuals and local communities to explore the conflicting ideologies and fantasies of the American West. It is a search for what is invisible  and embedded within the landscape, a meditation on what is simultaneously real and imagined. The project is a culmination of several years of research on the subject, with most material being produced just prior to the November 2016 Presidential Election.

Burning-in Patterns depicts a German ethnographer. Between the 1960s and 1980s he completed more than 400 ethnographic films of indigenous communities around the world for renowned institutions such as the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) in Göttingen, the BBC, Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC) and various museums worldwide. By using the same techniques he himself used to create his ethnographic films, the resulting film examines the many ambiguities of ethnographic fieldwork, institutional archiving and the conservation of memory. The film oscilates between objectification and subjective accounts. Through playing with the gaps of montage, the juxtaposition of image, text and sound the film’s shifting narrative moves between filmic document, recounted memory and the act of staging.

Using various levels of imagery, the essay film Europium draws connections between Papua  New Guinea's colonial past and the planned excavation of raw materials from the Bismarck Sea.  The film weaves a narrative around the rare earth element Europium; named after the European continent, the material will be culled from the ocean floor to ensure brilliant color images on smartphone displays and other flat screens, and of course for its fluorescent property, which is used to guarantee the authenticity of euro bank notes. The film describes this seemingly mundane fact as a return and repetition of history, pointing in the process not only to the complexity of human culture, its economies and systems of exchange, but also exposing the invisible ghosts of the past as they appear in the modern objects of our lives.   

-Philipp Kleinmichel

The Villages is a documentary film, presenting two geographically distinct communities as they begin to merge into one fictive filmed space. The film moves from intimacy to observation, focusing on a retirement community of the same name and the former German colonial town of Swakopmund, Namibia, most recently appearing as the setting for the remake of the British television series, The Prisoner.  Using the series as a leitmotif,  The Villages portrays the reconstruction and the idealization of colonial histories, through the architecture, borders and social relations of both communities.  A narrative begins to form between the analogies of spaces and the conventions of documentary, between the synchronization of image and sound; between acting and editing.  The Villages represents a fantastic dystopian space, through the ever evolving social segregation of the communities and the transformation of tourism into everyday life.

We are Stardust We are Golden and We´ve got to get Ourselves back to the Garden

The film, whose title is taken from a verse of Joni Mitchell's song "Woodstock," returns to the place where the legendary festival of the same name took place in 1969. Exactly forty years later, a 16mm camera documents the now privatized grounds, which are patrolled by police. It captures the surveillance and fences surrounding the field, as well as the commodification of the "counterculture" in the newly opened museum.