In 1988, the British director Cynthia Beatt, who is based in Berlin, conceived a special cinematic bike tour. She selected a number of places along the 160 km long border where the young Tilda Swinton cycled along and thus apparently circled the island of West Berlin once. Today CYCLING THE FRAME is a rare historic document and Tilda Swinton is one of the world’s most admired performers.
Cynthia Beatt
GER 1983, 25 min
FURY IS A FEELING TOO is both a documentary on the city of Berlin and a personal essay on alienation and being an alien in that city Cynthia Beatt raises questions and provokes reflection on a wide range of issues concerning language and culture, politics and history.
GB/GER 2014, 96 min
Stella discovers that she has a distant but personal relationship to a historic building in Berlin and embarks on a journey into the past. One that turns out to be much more alive, ambiguous and unpredictable than expected. The quest for answers takes her beyond the dispossession of Jews in pre-war Europe and post-war German restitution law to highly charged questions of expropriation of Palestinian land.
"Matisse felt that the human side of painting is the result of a mysterious, expressive quality which, if the painter is possessed of a good sensibility, comes through in the final painting. Thus it need not be overly stated in the subject matter ... He was referring to paintings, but I apply it to cinema. It is about perception. I like films that have a deceptive lightness, with underlying layers of consciousness, images, sound. Film is like music. In a sense, I compose my films as musical scores."
GER 2009, 60 min
In 1988, the British director Cynthia Beatt, who is based in Berlin, conceived a special cinematic bike tour. She selected a number of places along the 160 km long border where the young Tilda Swinton cycled along and thus apparently circled the island of West Berlin once. Today CYCLING THE FRAME is a rare historic document and Tilda Swinton is one of the world’s most admired performers.