Today’s film that we are going to feature, which will be played during the November’s Strasburg Film Festival is The Astronauts’ Bodies.
Directed by Alisa Berger, this is a German film with English subtitles. The plot goes as the following:
When his two mature children Anton (19) and Linda(19) start leaving the house, as they just have graduated from school, father Michael (55) stops taking care of his body as a protest. His son Anton takes part in a bed-rest-study to contribute to space-traveling, while his sister Linda is in search of her first love and is drawn to a young man, who seems to have similar problems like her father.
The full film fest schedule will be released in early September but you can buy one day or three day passes now.
Filmmaker Backgrounds
Alisa Berger is a German artist with North Korean and Jewish roots. Alisa graduated 2016 at the KHM Cologne.
She works in the fields of film, video art, expanded cinema and audiovisual performance. “The Body of the Astronauts” was her graduation film at the KHM.
Since 2016, Alisa curates the video art and film program as well as the audiovisual performance program of the FAR OFF Contemporary Art Fair.
She is the 2017) scholarship holder of the DAAD and the International Exchange of the Women’s Culture Bureau NRW and part of the Goethe-Institut traveling exhibition “DIE GRENZE”, where her latest video work is in Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine.
Director Statement
In „Die Körper der Astronauten” I want to expand boundaries of genres and make it a universal story that touches the hearts of humans and ignites an impulse inside of them to go beyond that which made them fabricate their own ideas of how life should be and what their purpose or goal could be.
In my experimental feature film „Die Körper der Astronauten” (The Astronauts’ Bodies), which is also my graduation film from Academy of Media Arts, I want to expand boundaries of genres and make something in-between a narrative feature film and video-art on the topic of emotional zero-gravity.
Zita Aretz, who plays Linda in The Astronauts’ Bodies.
My primarily interest was not telling the story of alcohol abuse, emotional violence or social misery but about the dreams of these four protagonists, their desires to approach their wishes and / or each other. Their willingness to be good, to be particular, to be someone, to be loved, to be for one another or for oneself. In between stands the fragile autonomy of the body, which is a question: body in this case is not the vitale. Body is the repressed, the exiled, from the perception of reason, the uncontrollable, which has a constant longing. This longing is shown in the film as decay (Michael), paralysis and control (Anton), sexual desire and insecurity (Linda) and detachment of function (Irene). It is a film about the longing of exiled bodies. For me, film is not a conceptual instrument, but a non-verbal emotional experience that reaches the audience at a buried level of their personality.
