This programme presents three films exploring collective and personal histories through richly poetic representations of objects and places. Reflecting the structure of the eponymous feature film, The View from Our House, the programme journeys between memories and geographies of Berlin and London, with each of the films giving voice to the latent histories revealed by their subtle interrogations of everyday details.

Peter Todd, Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin will be in conversation with Louis Benassi following the screening.

We Saw
Peter Todd
2009 | 4 min | Colour | 16mm

"At home, we saw, through the windows, and snow, and wind, and sun, and the garden, and flowers in a vase..." – Peter Todd 

"The object he has filmed, his house, a tree, a street, the underground are things that we come across every day and that seem to have come into the film by some chance operation. But he films these things with such determination, and with so much respect for their being that it seems as if they themselves had decided on the framing and the length of image and their place in the film and the filmmaker had only very conscientiously fulfilled their demands." – Renate Sami, Filmsamstag

A Year/Ein Jahr
Renate Sami
2011 | 12 min | Colour | Digital

"A tree seen through the window of my kitchen. And behind the tree a wall, the stucco old and falling in pieces, leaving strange abstract forms and designs that changed with the light according to the time of day and season.

I started to film in early spring and went on through summer, fall and winter. The tree grew leaves and shed them. There was sunshine and rain, hail and a storm, snow and there were birds: I saw a sparrow and heard many others; I heard a blackbird, a pigeon and some crows. There was faint music sometimes and a church bell ringing from very far away. And suddenly one evening behind a window that had always been dark a lamp was turned on and off again.

The film is constructed like a poem. What would be the end of a line in a poem is here marked by 24 frames of black leader separating one, two or a cluster of images to give it a rhythmic structure." – Renate Sami

The View from Our House
Anthea Kennedy, Ian Wiblin
2013 | 76 min | Colour | Digital

"Striking audiovisual essay about the power of memory." – International Film Festival Rotterdam

A woman witnesses the ordinary oppression and fear of the early years of National Socialism. She describes the sounds she regularly hears on passing a military barracks whilst walking from her house to the station. Images of the barracks recur throughout the film, suggesting the routine tyranny that precipitates the woman's increasing fear and eventual journey into exile in London. The film's structure of repetition and retelling foregrounds the way in which her life is stunted by increasing marginalisation and terror. "I’m only just eighteen but sometimes I already feel so old that I think of dying," she writes in a letter to her would-be lover. The View from Our House is based in part on the memories, unsent letters and notebooks of a young photographer who lived in Berlin-Tempelhof. Aspects of her life are mapped out within this small area of Berlin through a succession of haunted images and sounds that imbue place with a sense of memory and history.

More info:
http://gailpellettproductions.com/a-yearein-jahr-a-film-by-renate-sami/
www.view-from-our-house.info