Taboo Ceremony

HD Video, color, sound
20 minutes
30 photographs, official documents. wooden table and glas cover 200 x 80 cm
2017

A Tabu in Fiji traditionally defines a thing or place as sacred and prohibits any human interference once it is installed. The film takes witness in the ceremonial practice of establishing the first Tabu in the open ocean following a unique ritual. Men from Vanua Vatu island are joined during the traditional practice by the art organization TBA21 Academy. The film follows the diverse group during this unprecedented event. 

The installation within the exhibition The Oceanic at CCA Singapore also consisted of a table of additional documents and images, some turned to their back.

AMERICIUM

HD Video, color, sound
40 minutes
Carpet and window foiling
2017

Taking its title from a man made radioactive element, AMERICIUM 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. Most filming material had been produced just prior to the November 2016 Presidential election. 

The installation at Glasmoog Cologne in 2017 included window foiling that resembled a casino design, effectively blocking the view into the interior of the space.

In collaboration with Erik Blinderman

Music: Floating Cult by John Butcher
Image and Sound: Erik Blinderman and Lisa Rave
Sound Design: Christian Obermaier
Sound Mixing: Ralf Schipke /  Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln

With kind support by the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (KHM)
and Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture San Sebastian 

Produced by Whole Wall Films

Bar del Ponte – a trailer

16 mm transferred to HD, HD Video, color, sound
4 minutes
2015

Located in the heart of the Italian city Albenga, Bar del Ponte served as a vital social gathering place for refugees faced with numerous obstacles on their path to integration. 

Run by a compassionate Moroccan, it provided a safe haven for individuals fleeing war,

persecution, and hardship. Within its walls, people from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences found solace and companionship. What initially began as a trailer for a semi fictional film, transformed into a short documentary about the making of a film. The bar was closed by the municipality shortly after the first filming took place.

Burning–in Patterns

16mm transferred to HD Video, color, sound
25 minutes
2015

Between the 1960s and 1980s the German ethnographer completed more than 400 ethnographic films of indigenous communities around the world, studying and documenting their cultures, societies, and behaviors for renowned institutions such as the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC) as well as 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 oscillates between objectification and subjective accounts that weave into the films fabric. 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.

In collaboration with Anna Vetter

Camera: Jürgen Haller
Sound: Jürgen Haller, Anna Vetter
Montage: Lisa Rave
Sound editing: Tobias Bilz
Color grading: wave-line GmbH Berlin
16mm transfer: Reiner Meyer, Kornmanufaktur, Berlin

Produced by Whole Wall Films

With kind support by:
Künstlerinnen Programm des Berliner Senats
Akademie Schloss Solitude

EUROPIUM

HD Video, color, sound
21 minutes
2014

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

A film by Lisa Rave

Voiceover: Hanne Lippard
Written by Lisa Rave, co-writer and editor: Erik Blinderman
Assistance: Anna Vetter
1st camera: Nicola Hens
2nd camera: Erik Blinderman
Camera  Operator: Moritz Fehr
Sound editing: Christian Obermaier
Color grading: Moritz Fehr

Produced by Whole Wall Films

Production funded by:
Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein
Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn
Videokunst Förderpreis BremenAkademie Schloss Solitude

Additional links and publications:
Vdrome
Mousse Magazine
TAZ
Transmediale 

The Villages

16mm transferred to HD Video, color, sound
30 minutes
2011

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.

- Jakob Schillinger 

In collaboration with Erik Blinderman

Image and Sound: Erik Blinderman, Lisa Rave

Editing: Lisa Rave

Sound editing and mixing: Christian Obermaier
Colorist:  Antonia Gogin / Venim Berlin

With kind support by:
Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein
Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium Berlin
Venim Berlin

We are Stardust

16 mm film transferred to HD Video 
Nagra analogue sound 
digital transfer

We are Stardust We are Golden and We´ve got to get Ourselves back to the Garden, 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, the archaic 16mm film camera and analogue sound document the now privatized grounds patrolled by the police, capturing the surveillance as well as the commodification of "counterculture" at the newly opened museum.

Camera: Fern Silva
Sound: David Horvitz

With kind support by Bard College, New York