Fast Forward 2017 / Projections:
11. 12. 2017 / 21:00h / KIC – Dodest Scene / Podgorica
Petra Epperlein, Michael Tucker, SAD, Njemačka, 2016, 89′
Directors: Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker
Screenplay: Petra Epperlein, Michael Tucker
Director of photography: Michael Tucker
Editor: Petra Epperlein, Michael Tucker
Music: Alexander Kliment
Sound: Petra Epperlein, Michael Tucker
Producer: Michael Tucker, Petra Epperlein
Production Company: Pepper & Bones
Synopsis
Twenty-five years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), filmmaker Petra Epperlein returns to the proletarian Oz of her childhood to find the truth about her late father’s suicide and his rumoured Stasi past. Had he been an informant for the secret police? Was her childhood an elaborate fiction? As she looks for answers in the Stasi’s extensive archives, she pulls back the curtain of her own nostalgia and enters the parallel world of the security state, seeing her former life through the lens of the oppressor. Reconstructing everyday GDR life through declassified Stasi surveillance footage, the past plays like dystopian science fiction, providing a chilling backdrop to interrogate the apparatus of control and the meaning of truth in a society where every action and thought was suspect.
About the authors
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, aka Pepper & Bones, are a husband-and-wife team who work between Berlin and New York. Epperlein was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt, GDR, Tucker was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. They met in New York in 1994 and immediately began work on the The Last Cowboy – one of the earliest examples of digital film. Later they made documentaries on the Iraq war. Gunner Palace premiered at Telluride and Toronto in 2004, The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair premiered at Toronto in 2006 and was later nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Their documentaries received numerous nominations and awards all over the world.
Festivals and awards
Durban International Film Festival (South Africa)
DocAviv (Israel)
Indie Lisboa (Portugal)
Laemmle Monica Film Center, LA (USA)
Film Forum New York (USA)
Movies That Matter International Film Festival (The Netherlands)
CPH: DOX, Copenhagen (Denmark)
Guadalajara International Film Festival (Mexico)
Salem Film Festival (USA)
Palm Springs International Film Festival (USA)
Stockholm International Film Festival (Sweden)
Chicago International Film Festival (USA)
New York Film Festival (USA)
Toronto International Film Festival (Canada)