Over a period of six months, Elfi Mikesch interviewed and filmed the residents of a retirement home in Hamburg. She captures these moments and life stories in a poetic way.
Elfi Mikesch
GER 1980, 109 min
D 1997, 87 min
Torsten Ricardo Engelholz, 31 years old, was locked in a dark room by his parents for most of his childhood and then placed in a psychiatric ward. Torsten Ricardo loves riding the subway and spends every free minute doing so. In addition to this passion, he is a talented painter and actor in the professional theater group Thikwa in Berlin. He is highly interested in German history.
D 1978, 82 min
“A Film for Every Living Room” was intended to be "I Often Think of Hawaii", in which fantasies and everyday life take on special significance. The film tells the story of sixteen-year-old Carmen, who lives with her mother, Ruth Rossol, and her brother, Tito, in an apartment building on the outskirts of West Berlin. It is the 1970s. Her mother worked for years on the assembly line at a button factory and now earns a living for the family as a cleaning lady. The children’s father, a Puerto Rican career soldier, left them after Carmen was born.
GER 2000, 80 min
“The Markus Family” tells the story of Markus Anatol Weisse, who, despite being severely visually impaired, has astonishingly become a painter; he builds mechanical creatures and wishes he were a bio-robot himself—a cyborg. And he desperately wants to live in the city. In Berlin, where he was born. Markus lives with his mother and elderly father, the goats, a dog, and his computer in southern France—“at the end of the world,” as he puts it—in a biotope where the survival skills of creativity prevail.
GER 1979, 25 min
The drama of a woman who attempted a kind of liberal emancipation in a time of upheaval but got caught in the snares of men. A study of Mary Stuart. The contradictoriness and the variety of material with which the person of Mary was surrounded over time gave me the idea of trivialising this "royal story". I compressed the information into images of passion, power, love, pain and death. EXECUTION is a photographic film of single images which alludes to the ambivalence of the two complementary media of film and photography. - Elfi Mikesch
GER 1993-1995, 75 min
The stories of these short films take place in former militarized zones who slowly get reclaimed by nature. Remains tell stories of former lives, long forgotten family stories and a crazy, wild, female ghost in costume. (Filmarchiv Austria / METRO)
GER 2024, 86 min
Wünsdorf is a former military base in Brandenburg (Germany), which the Russian army had left in 1994. The First and Second World Wars were planned and executed from here as well as the Cold War. The architect, urban planner and pioneer of ecological urban development Prof. Dr. Ekhart Hahn stands up for a sustainable transformation. During the making of the film, the war breaks out in Ukraine. Russia’s invasion gives the former military site and the film a new meaning.
"I like to mix all genres, play with them, proceeding in a montage-like manner and using very contradicting devices. It is not streamlined and is therefore often labelled experimental film. I prefer transgressions, even within contrasting genres."
Photo: Monika Treut (l.) and Elfi Mikesch (r.)
GER 2011, 97 min
Werner Schroeter, one of the greatest directors of New German Film, finds out that he is terminally ill with cancer in 2006. He is in the midst of staging SCHÖNHEIT DER SCHATTEN, a scenic project on Robert Schumann and Heinrich Heine at Düsseldorf’s Kunsthalle. A race against time begins, determined by hope and apprehension.
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