Bauhaus Uni Goes Cinematic

What as recently as 1996 was merely a lowly building construction school has taken one more long stride to becoming a full-fledged, bona fide University: the Bauhaus Film Institute was declared functioning in the local commercial cinema by Gerd Zimmermann, the one-time architectural historian become Rektor, who greeted that mix of students and professors that makes such a specialized school possible—eager undergrads, already credentialed pros from the fabled Babelsberg near Potsdam, not to exclude less prestigious institutes from Magdeburg and Leipzig, active profi’s from Mitteldeutschrundfunk (MDR), the indigenous broadcasting facility in the nearby state capital of Erfurt.

They had been easing into such a U relationship with a TV magazine with the beguiling title of UNI Cato, “unikum” being German for a unique object, ”unikat” a one of a kind work of art. In this instance student documentaries, a sampler of which the inaugural audience relished on this opening day.

But the true sensation was a documentary on the making of a doc called Feuerherz (Heart of Fire) about Eritrean amateurs learning how to act in a documentary on their tribal alienation in an UN refugee camp in Northern Kenya. (Asmara brass wouldn’t let the film “their lies” in Eritrea!) Strangely, this film with an Italian director and a Canadian writer, was a major flop at the last Berlinale. They went back to their storyboards and came back with this winner.

The film begins with a pre-teen girl chastising her card playing father for not carrying water into the camp, an adult chore laid on this fragile girl. Father lays down his cards and thwaps her a painful slap on her right cheek! At which time we astonishingly learn the true Biblical meaning of “turning the other cheek!” It means you have not succumbed to the first self-righteous slap of the right hand on the victim’s right cheek!

That injunction to the really righteous makes good sense for the first time. Think of how the pervasive male status had corrupted that Biblical injunction for females and other “subjects” to keep revolting against the morally revolting, e.g., fathers who slap their exploited, exhausted daughters! What a difference the Truth makes!

But the heroine of this masterpiece is the teen who epiphanously notices that her Ethiopian “foe” is the same color and speaks the same language as she. There is her future. All praise to Clara Goldsmith and Luigi Falorni for not giving up or giving in their first time around! For more detail, contact Juliana Fuchs (45-171-4285044) or Professor Wolfgang Kissel.