Film Review: My name is not Ali – Ali im Paradies – Jannat Ali
Posted in conjunction with the course Multicultural Germany in fall semester 2015. Author: Tina Schlagenhaufer Film Review: Viola Shafik’s My name is not Ali – Ali im Paradies – Jannat Ali My Name Is Not Ali is a documentary by Viola Shafik[1] from the year 2011 about the actor El Hedi Ben Salem M’barek Mohammed Mustafa, who was […]
Film Review: The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)
Posted in conjunction with the course Multicultural Germany in fall semester 2015. Author: Gradey Wang The 2006 German drama film The Lives of Others (German: Das Leben der Anderen) directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck follows the lives of playwright Georg Dreyman (played by Sebastian Koch) and his girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (played by Martina Gedeck) in […]
“Made in Germany: Identity and Memory” by Jung Woo Park
Last Tuesday, we had the opportunity to watch the film Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland, a German comedy film about a former Turkish guest worker. The film was very interesting, not only because it deftly wove comedy into the history of the Guest Worker Program, but also because it reminded me of another film about […]
Multicultural Germany Course: Week 5 Summary (Sept. 28 & 30)
This last week in class, we discussed the idea of German collective memory and screened the film Almanya – Welcome to Germany. The week’s discussions started with how the term “melting pot” was used to describe US culture in the early 1900s. The picture found on the Wikipedia page for the term (The Melting Pot) […]
Multicultural Germany Course: Summary of the First Two Weeks
To summarize the first two weeks of the seminar “Multicultural Germany” (fall 2015) it is best to start off with the participants: One third of the class is exchange students, mostly from Germany. Due to this the class can benefit from the insights and background information these students bring to the table. Another bonus is […]
A Path through the Woods: Remediating Affective Landscapes in Documentary Asylum Worlds
Bettina Stoetzer Download PDF Abstract In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that an engagement with the legacies of German nationalism requires a track through the woods: throughout German history, forests have played a key role as origin myth to found a national identity (Schama 1995). In today’s forests, these entanglements between the […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School and Christian Petzold
by Marco Abel by Jaimey Fisher Download PDF Abel, Marco. The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School. Rochester: Camden House, 2013. 348 pages. Cloth, $90.00. Fisher, Jaimey. Christian Petzold. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 208 pages. Paper, $22.00. “What is the Berlin School?” is the central question for Marco Abel’s most recent book, the […]
Multicultural Germany Class Final Paper: Staged Realities
At the end of the past semester, students in the Multicultural Germany class at UC Berkeley wrote final papers on topics of their choosing. To conclude our series of posts from this class, we are delighted to share several of their papers here. This paper is by Treasure Nguyen, who wrote about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film, Angst […]
Multicultural Germany Class: Week 2, Socialist Friends – Part 1
This post is part of a series in which students reflect on their discussions in the UC Berkeley undergraduate seminar “Multicultural Germany.” This week two students have written summaries of the past week’s sessions. The first is by Brittany Scott: The first discussion of the week began with an intriguing presentation by fellow classmate Jenelle, who gave […]
“Berlin and Beyond” SF Film Festival Begins
From January 15 to 21 in San Francisco, the annual “Berlin and Beyond” festival will present recent film productions from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Of particular interest to our project are three films: Your Beauty is Worth Nothing, directed by Hüseyin Tabak, focuses on a young Kurdish migrant in Austria. Actress and Director Aylin Tezel, best […]