MARX is Olaf Nicolai’s audacious 24-hour film created from a single shot of a sole statue: a vast bronze bust of Karl Marx, installed 50 years ago in Nicolai’s hometown of Chemnitz (formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt). Shot in one take on the 2020 autumnal equinox, when day and night are equal lengths, and screened on the same date, MARX transforms this iconic figure into a kind of unnatural landscape, subject to constant change beneath the evolving light of night and day. Turning notions of time upside down and inside out, this 24-hour film will be screened at 17 worldwide venues all at once – like an artificial sun rotating around the Earth.
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Unannounced, Aziza is once again standing in her room – internship, Portugal, everything canceled. But her room is occupied. Her mother, Trixi, has rented it out. Zach lives there now, a twenty-something from New Zealand, who came to Germany on a one-way ticket. Starting from this situation, the film develops an almost documentary-style portrait of a Kreuzberg ‘situation’: everything is readily available, time, people, summer, streets. And in the end a crash, the film itself: ‘for nothing’?
In the light of the current transformations within the global power structure, I WANT TO SEE THE MANAGER traces the linkage of economic ascent and decline in seven paradigmatic episodes. India, Bolivia, China, USA, Italy, Thailand, Venezuela - each place contains fragments of another; each episode bears testament to the hopes and fears of its protagonists. By juxtaposing these local experiences in the face of global economy, the film questions the notion of rise and decay.
Air To Breathe is a film about a group of militant workers inside the Opel car plant in Bochum, Germany. The group was founded in 1972, initially with the help of revolutionaries from the 1968 movement. For over 40 years, the group fought for better working conditions inside the plant. Over time, their incessant rank-and-file activism made the workers in Bochum the most radical in the entire German metal sector: Opel Bochum saw several wildcat strikes, and a persistent and successful fight for the reduction of daily working time. The group even attempted to build up direct links between different workforces of General Motors in Europe to fight back against the raise to the bottom of wages and working conditions in a situation of worldwide competition for investments amongst GM plants. Their activities culminated in a six days wildcat strike in 2004.
