Special Screenings: Film meets Philosophy

09/05 (Thursday), 19:00

WINGS OF DESIRE  (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987)
dir. Wim Wenders (DE/FR), 128’
Special Screenings: Film meets Philosophy
Official Opening of the 9. Philosophical Film Festival

Topic: "Wim Wenders: Travelling as a Quest for Our Own Identity"
– Marjan Vujovich (Head of the Museum of Yugoslav Cinematheque in Belgrade) (in Serbian)


What is it that people know, but angels don’t know? Wenders’s timeless film about seeing doesn’t have people as the protagonists, but angels, whose peaceful gaze along with the one of the camera show a different perspective (or possibility) for seeing the world. The angels in WINGS OF DESIRE are good, invisible creatures overlooking the world, listening to the thoughts of mortals while trying to offer them a consolation. One of them, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), wishes to become human and “to enter the history of the world” when he falls in love with the beautiful trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin). Peter Falk, playing himself, helps him during his transformation, introducing him to the small pleasures of life and to “what it is to be a human”. WINGS OF DESIRE marked the coming of Wenders back to Germany, being his first German film after spending eight years in the United States. Shot two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film is an homage to the “divided” city from a unique perspective, that of the angels. The film whose co-writer is Peter Handke (Als das Kind Kind war…), won the Best Director Award in Cannes (1987) and the European Film Awards (1988) and since than it has earned its cult status. After the film follows a talk and discussion with Marjan Vujovic, Head of the Museum of the Yugoslavian Cinematheque in Belgrade, Serbia (in Serbian)

10/05 (Friday), 18:30 h.

Feature film, Hungary, 116 min., color
Director & Screenplay: Ildikó Enyedi

Topic: „The Intimate Communication between the Body and Soul" - academic Katica Kulavkova, Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences (in Macedonian)

In this unconventional love story two introverts, both employees in a meat factory, unexpectedly discover that they share the same dream every night. At the beginning, both are confused and find it hard to believe that such a thing is possible at all. How is it possible to share the same dream with someone else? And, if it is possible, what if you meet that other person - what would you feel, fear or happiness? After a while, as they begin to accept this odd coincidence, Maria and Andre will try to recreate what happens in their shared subconscious into the real world.
ON BODY AND SOUL is a great comeback of the Hungarian director and screenwriter Ildikó Enyedi who won the Golden Camera on Cannes in 1989 for her first feature film "My 20th century" (Az én XX. Századom). ON BODY AND SOUL is a film in which "the dream is a setting for a metaphysical encounter between Maria and Andre and (...) represents a form of metaphysical existence without which reality would be too profane" - says academic Katica Kulavkova. The eternal philosophical problem of the body and the soul in Enyedi’s film obtains a poetical and oneiric artistic form. The film has won the Golden Bear on the Berlinale in 2017 and was Hungary’s nominee for Best Foreign Language Film for the Oscars in 2018.

After the film follows a talk by academic Katica Kulavkova, MANU (in Macedonian)

11/05 (Saturday), 18:30 h.

Feature film, Poland / Denmark, 82 min., B&W
Director: Paweł Pawlikowski

Topic “Ida: An Attempt for a Cross-Cultural Reading”- Naum Trajanovski, MA (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw) (in Macedonian)

Poland, 1962. Anna is a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman who is preparing to become a nun in the monastery where she lived since a child as an orphan. When she learns she has a living relative, her mother’s sister Wanda, she must visit her before taking her vows and learn some more about the roots of her long lost family. Together, the two women embark on a voyage of discovery of each other and discover the mysterious past of their family. Anna finds out that her aunt is not only a former hard-line Communist state prosecutor, but also a Jew.
Who is Anna/Ida now and where will her path take her? Divided between her religious life and the future in the monastery, from one side, and the possibility of a life outside the monastery, a life she never believed it was possible until now, she has to put her decision to a test. This poignant and intimate drama of Pawlikovski which deals with the questions of identity, family, faith, the feeling of belonging and history has won the European Film Award for Best Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language in 2014. The film has also won the 2015 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

After the film follows a talk on the topic “Ida: An Attempt for a Cross-Cultural Reading” by Naum Trajanovski, MA (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw) (in Macedonian)

12/05 (Sunday), 18:30 h.

Documentary, Latvia, 10 min., B&W
Director & Screenplay: Herz Frank

10 MINUTES OLDER is one of the most influential short films in the history of cinema. A representative of the Baltic New Wave, the film contains no words; it just observes some children watching a puppet show. In ten intense minutes most of the human feelings live in the open faces of children – joy, fear, pity, terror and happiness. In just one take – for 10 minutes! – the face of the child reflects the eternal battle between good and evil, becoming a "mirror" of the invisible human soul.
Herz Frank, one of the most famous documentary filmmakers of Latvia who at the beginning of the '60s was among the first to establish the so-called Riga poetic documentary school – said: "I have not filmed anything extraordinary. All my films are about life, love, and death”, and on his filmmaking , he says that apparently his method is also as “simple as that” enabling to make shattering films that leave their impact not with a sensational plot but by posing ethical questions with harsh and existential edge. Inspired by this simple, but extraordinary idea, 15 international directors, film auteurs from Europe and USA, among which Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Claire Denis, and Aki Kaurismäki - have made their own versions of the film - 10 MINUTES OLDER: TRUMPET and 10 MINUTES OLDER: CHELLO (2002) which had their premiere on Cannes IFF in 2002.

12/05 (Sunday), 18:30 h.

Documentary, Latvia / Lithuania / Estonia, 78 min., color, B&W
Director & Screenplay: Audrys Stonys, Kristīne Briede
Q&A with Kristīne Briede


“Is there a meaning to filmmaking?” Or, what is it that we are doing in documentary cinema? This new documentary by Audrius Stonys and Kristīne Briede is a meditative journey which leads us to (re)discover the Grand Masters of the Baltic poetic documentary – Herz Frank, Uldis Brauns, Ivars Seleckis, Mark Soosaar, Andress Sööt, Robertas Verba, Henrikas Šablevičius and Aivars Freimanis and their poetic treatment of the ontology of documentary creation making up the unique phenomenon in the history of cinema - the Baltic school of poetic documentary.
With their captivating black & white images of man and nature, they “film the Earth, but remember that Heaven is above us” (Frank), filming the substance, the reality, but also showing us the ideal and the spiritual contained in the material. It is films which are humane, meaningful, and poetic, showing us a new way of looking at the world and reconsidering the very nature of documentary cinema as an art form. The film of Audrius Stonys and Kristīne Briede, through a creative building of bridges of time with this unique collection of archives, is promising a discovery of a new wave in the history of cinema – the Baltic New Wave of poetic documentary and its less-remembered generation of cinema poets from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

15/05 (Wednesday), 18:30 h.

Feature film, UK / USA, 110 min., color
Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Topic "Children of Men: Anthropocene’s “Père-version”; Patriarchy’s Demise" - Dr. Gabriella Calchi Novati (C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich) (in English)

London, 2027. The youngest person in the world dies at the age of 18 and humanity is faced with the danger of its own extinction. In this dystopia in which women for almost two decades are infertile, the world is on the brink of collapse, and all humanity and morality start eroding. Great Britain is the only country in which most immigrants are trying to find asylum, but very quickly turns into a police state resembling Orwell's 1984. When among the refugees a miraculously pregnant woman shows up, a former activist will try to revive the last hope for the survival and the future of humanity on Earth. CHILDREN OF MEN is a British-American dystopian thriller directed and co-written by the Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón. One of the most prominent films today, the film can be seen as an artistic representation of the so-called Anthropocene (the period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the Earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age). The screenplay is based on the book “Children of Men” by Phyllis Dorothy James (1992), and in 2016 was selected by BBC Culture’s poll as 13th among 100 greatest films of the 21st century by 177 international critics. What would happen in a future, in which man is not the “center” and the “measure” of the world? A world in which some kind of future is possible without him?
After the film follows a talk on the topic Children of Men: Anthropocene’s “Père-version”; Patriarchy’s Demise by Dr. Gabriella Calchi Novati (visiting professor on Trinity College Dublin and a psychoanalyst in training at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich) (in English)

16/05 (Thursday), 18:30 h.
Feature film, France / Germany, 122 min., color
Director & Screenplay: Bruno Dumont

Topic: "What Are We Laughing At? Skepticism as a Joke in Film-Philosophy" – Dr. David Sorfa (University of Edinburgh, UK)

During the summer of 1910, several tourists have vanished while relaxing on the beautiful beaches of the Channel Coast. Infamous inspectors Machin and Malfoy soon gather that the epicenter of these mysterious disappearances must be Slack Bay, a site where a small community of fishermen and other oyster farmers live. Among them evolves a curious family, the Brufort, lead by the father nicknamed “The Eternal” and his son Ma Loute. On the other side, towering high above the bay stands the Typhonium, the magnificent mansion of the van Peteghems’, an eccentric bourgeois family which spends every summer on the bay… This unusual comedy with elements of slapstick and burlesque, and with one of the most peculiar roles of Juliette Binoche on the big screen, was nominated for the “Golden Palm” on the Cannes International Film Festival in 2016. The beginning of the 20th century marks the growth of the bourgeoisie, industry, capitalism and, therefore, the rising class struggle, and Dumont’s film is exactly about this founding narrative, a primitive film about our age. For the director, cinema is “another and perhaps funnier way to do philosophy” – a discipline which he pondered for a long time in university when he studied Aesthetics in Cinema and wrote his thesis “Philosophy and Aesthetic of the Underground Cinema.”

After the film follows a talk on the topic What Are We Laughing At? Skepticism as a Joke in Film-Philosophy by Dr. David Sorfa (Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and editor-in-chief of the journal Film-Philosophy) (in English)