The European Refugee Crisis: Havarie and the Art of Slow Cinema

October 13, 2017 6:00PM - 8:45PM at Bear Vs Bull

For full schedule of Litquake 2017, click here:
http://www.litquake.org/2017-litquake-festival

Co-presented by Center for the Art of Translation, Goethe-Institut San Francisco, and Unnamed Press

Inspired by a short cellphone video of a raft of refugees, shot by a tourist from the deck of a cruise ship, Merle Kröger and Philip Scheffner created both a feature film and a novel, Havarie (Collision). Scheffner’s film loops the original clip into a haunting 90-minute “slow cinema” hallucination and meditation on the nature of refugees, while Kröger’s book unspools a crime story from the same collection of characters. Kröger reads from her book, followed by a screening of Havarie, and then an onstage discussion with both Kröger and Scheffner, moderated by CCA film professor Nilgun Bayraktar. $15 adv / door

With:

Merle Kröger is a novelist, script writer, and film producer living in Berlin, Germany. She produces art films and documentaries for international arthouse cinema. She also writes scripts for independent cinema in India. Since 2003, Kröger has published four novels, which combine documentary research, personal history, and political analysis with elements of crime literature. For Grenzfall (2012) and Havarie (Collision) (2015), she received the German Crime Novel Award. Collision will be published in November 2017 by Unnamed Press.

Philip Scheffner, born 1966 in Homburg/Saar, lives and works as an artist and filmmaker in Berlin. Together with Merle Kröger, Alex Gerbaulet and Caroline Kirberg, he runs the production platform pong. He took part in the Berlinale Forum with Havarie (2016), And-Ek Ghes… (2016), Revision (2012), Der Tag des Spatzen (2010), and The Halfmoon Files (2007).

Nilgun Bayraktar (moderator) is an assistant professor of film in the Visual Studies Program at California College of the Arts. She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies and Film & Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on migrant and diasporic cinema, experimental and avant-garde cinema, site-specific art, and performance. Her recently published book, "Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe" (Routledge 2016), examines cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe since the 1990s.

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