BEYOND THE NOW
2022
german premiere at Akademie der Künste, Berlin
1-channel film, colour&black and white, sound, shot on 4K anamorphic, aspect ratio 2,35:1 , 18 min,German with English subtitles
Cast Jules Elting Natasja Loutchko Ida Lennartsson Ulrike Hemberger Cleo Zindler
Author and Director Chris Berg, lighting Cinematographer Jakob Stark, Music by Matija Strniša
, Film Editing by Chris Berg
Sound Recording by Thomas Funk
, Production Coordination by Andrea Elsper, Assistant Camera by Nikolaus von Schlebrügge
Beyond the Now is an essay film that crosses the line between fiction and reality. The strong female ensemble cast immerses itself in an associative game that evokes the sequence of life cycles such as birth, deconstruction and death.
The film is a critical examination of the forest as a symbol of the romantics for foggy vision as well as utopian ideas about the future and dystopian realities.
Based on the Italian landscape, which was captured by German Romantics in paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries, a reflection of the past is interpreted here, but visions of escapism and a utopian future are also revealed. Opposite is an insight into a current forest area after a wildfire. This discrepancy between the actual state of existence and the hopes of the past forms the basis of the work. The central point in the film, meeting cities of this chamber play, is the bar of the Berlin Academy of Arts, built by Werner Düttmann with the idea of making the inside visible to the outside and bringing the outside, nature, inside. In the film, this place, also a place of gathering and artistic exchange, becomes a subdued place for intimate, inner processes such as love and revelation.
Through juxtaposition and contrasts, Beyond the Now comments on an age of paradoxes.