04/25/2025
EMAF 38 - Tips for the weekend

The International Selection presents works by established and emerging artists from around the world – many of them being shown in Germany for the first time. A recurring motif is the revisiting of personal and political stories in direct dialogue, but also in the encounter with places and landscapes. Some artists play with cinematic genres, especially elements of horror and suspense, which might also reflect their discomfort with the present. The more or less tamed nature – the garden, the park, the jungle – repeatedly appears as a historical backdrop, a personal anchor point or a utopian blueprint for an alternative way of living together. The following films will be screened tomorrow at 11 am at the Lagerhalle as part of the programme “A Deflected Signal”:
Dreams Of My Father, Jonathan Seungjoon Lee, KR, AR, NL 2024, 15’
Colorful Colorado Nails, Monica Panzarino, US 2024, 6’
Dreams of Sunlight Through Trees, Theo Cuthand, CA 2024, 15’
she’s waiting for the sunset, Martyna Ratnik, LT 2024, 8’
母の手紙 / Mother’s Letter, Sylvia Schedelbauer, DE 2025, 24’
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers (in English).
At EMAF in April 2024, Nahed Samour and Pary El-Qalqili took account of the repression and silencing of voices in Germany expressing solidarity with Palestine. One year later, Samour looks at where we are now: What to call the current societal condition? Has it already become permanent? Together with Anita Di Bianco and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Nahed Samour will discuss these questions in the Talk I could swear my face was touching stone: Continuities tomorrow at 1pm at Kunsthalle Osnabrück. In her ongoing project Corrections and Clarifications Anita Di Bianco compiles daily retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print news since September 1, 2001. Moving chronologically backwards from the present, Di Bianco suggests that the notion of historical ruptures is itself part of the misrepresentation and distortion and that the persistence of such revisions reveal a series of precedents. Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s essay What I Do Not Yet Recognize, Now at This Very Moment examines willful ignorance as part of structural racism and violence in Germany. How to unlearn the settings that shape and obfuscate one’s own perceptions – to allow for resonances with the knowledge and experience of migrant communities? In a collective reading, voices intervene in the silences and gaps. They offer testimony to continuities of denial, initiating a conversation on the challenges of speaking (up), and acts of refusal in a social landscape of anticipatory obedience.
From the feature film section, we recommend tomorrow’s German premiere of Candela Sotos’ Yrupẽ (ES 2025, 79’) – in Spanish with English subtitles. The search for ”The Irupé Flower,” a lost film by Guillermo Fernández-Zúñiga – a Spanish pioneer of scientific cinema exiled to Argentina after the Spanish Civil War – triggers a journey through family histories and national archives. As we follow the slow growth of the irupé in an aquarium in the car park of an art college in Buenos Aires, layers of images and empty spaces gradually emerge. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the filmmaker (in English). The event starts tomorrow at 5 pm at the Hasetor cinema.
Although 31 films have already been honoured as EMAF award winners in the International Selection – we will be celebrating the award ceremony of the Association of German Film Critics on Sunday at 11 am at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. The jury members of the German Film Critics’ Association, Günter Minas, Bianca Jasmina Rauch and Hannes Wesselkämper, will discuss the films of the International Selection and then award the EMAF Media Art Prize of the German Film Critics’ Association. After the screening of the award-winning film, all attendees are invited to join us for drinks and snacks.
If you wish, you can stay on at Kunsthalle Osnabrück afterwards and take a guided tour of the exhibition with our mediators. On Sunday at 4 pm is the last chance during the festival. There are public tours tomorrow at 12 noon, 4 pm and 6 pm, but even after the festival there will be a public tour every Sunday at 4 pm until the exhibition closes on 25 May. Groups can book a tour by emailing presse@emaf.de. Special offers and conditions are available for school groups.
Another highlight towards the end of the festival will be the feature film Macumba (BRD 1982, 88 min.) by Elfi Mikesch on Sunday at 6 pm at the Lagerhalle. The film tells the story of Magda, who lives with her friends in a Berlin house whose days are numbered. Everyone follows their own obsessions in their own way. A certain delirium turns everyday life into a dream, into a trance-like movement towards an uncertain future. Max Taurus, a gifted sleuth who calls himself a “detective,” follows a trail that leads him to this very demolition site, where he believes he can prevent a murder. In the process, he becomes entangled in a labyrinthine story from which he cannot free himself. The crash of the wrecking ball, accompanied by the music of Silvestre Revueltas, becomes a swan song for a way of life that has its roots in the 1960s. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker (in German).
The complete festival programme can be found here.
We wish you a sunny weekend at the EMAF in Osnabrück and look forward to a great second half of the festival!