Where Do We Migrate To? Film Series
Program 2: Sahara Chronicle
Date: Thursday, March 31, 2011
Time: 7:00 p.m.

Location: UMBC, Lecture Hall 3
DIRECTIONS & CAMPUS MAP
Cost: Free

Sahara Chronicle
Ursula Biemann
2007, DVD, 78 minutes, Switzerland

Ursula Biemann’s work consists of a number of short videos, which carefully detail the sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe. The visual material collected during various visits to central sites of the migration network in Morocco, Niger, and Mauritania, this piece documents and reflects the complexity and diversity of systems of migration. Bypassing the authoritarian voiceover as a manipulative device often used in documentary filmmaking, Biemann’s work opens up the ways in which the viewer might engage with the rich visual material and the textual information mapped onto the images.

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Where Do We Migrate To? Film Series
Opening Program: Fortress Europe
Date: Friday, March 18, 2011
Time: 6:30 p.m.

Location: Johns Hopkins University, Shriver Hall
DIRECTIONS & MAP
Cost: Free

Grossraum (Borders of Europe), Lonnie Van Brummelen and
Siebren de Haan, 2005, 35 minutes, 35mm, The Netherlands

A poetic triptych meticulously shot on 35mm, Grossraum examines three distinct border zones of the European continent, establishing Europe as a fluid, ever-expanding entity, which while reconfiguring its internal divisions simultaneously delineates increasingly enforced external borders. Van Brummelen and de Haan s film presents captivating images of these landscapes, as well as the daily activities that unfold at such sites of transit. The checkpoints this vis ually engaging film presents are Hrebenne (between Poland and Ukraine), Ceuta, a small Spanish enclave in mainland Morocco, and Nicosia, divided between Turkish-occupied North Cyprus and Greek S outh Cyprus, each loaded with political and historical significance visualizing the notions of exclusion and inclusion “fortress Europe” signifies.

Import / Export, Ulrich Seidl, 2007, 135 minutes, 35mm, Austria

Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl s feature film narrates two distinct trajectories of import and export across New Europe. A young Ukrainian nurse leaves her mother and infant son behind to pursue a more hopeful life in Austria, where she finds illegal work as a cleaning lady in a geriatric hospital, while an unemployed and debt-ridden Viennese youngster embarks on a reverse trajectory, helping his stepfather on a business trip to the Ukraine installing outmoded gambling machines. As the film ruthlessly delineates the various relationships of exchange between East and West (through which everything and everyone is for sale), Seidl uses these investigations to sketch the marked social inequalities throughout Europe, as well as more deeply rooted existential crises associated with the first world, throu gh which a stark portrait of Western Europe emerges.

Please join us for an after-screening reception in the back of the theatre.

Click here for more information about the film series