The Darkhad and Soyon Uriyanghai peoples live in a vast valley in Northern Mongolia, much as their ancestors have for centuries. "Taiga" is the record of a long period spent by the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger among these people.
Six life stories of German, Austrian and Russian Jews which intersect in exile in Shanghai. Out of narratives, photographs, documents and new images of the biggest and most contradictory metropolis of the Far East an entity develops in which the historic exile takes and turns on a completely...
China marks the beginning of the extensive Asian theme in Ottinger’s filmography and is her first travelogue. Her observant eye is interested in anything from Sichuan opera and the Beijing Film Studio to the production of candy and sounds of bicycle bells.
Ulrike Ottinger is an exceptional filmmaker and artist. Her cinematic universe has influenced entire generations. As a young woman, she brought the international art world to the sleepy town of Konstanz. It all began on the shores of Lake Constance where Ulrike Ottinger was born and where she still...
A narrative about "the days when the Jews found rest from their enemies and the month that was transformed from pain to joy, from mourning to a feast day." A parable about the courage to arrive in another country and a funny mound of joy about luck in misfortune. Narrated by György Konrád and...
Still Moving is one of the director’s most personal films, offering some insight into her artistic process. It is an assemblage of her father’s African collection, photographs made by Ottinger in the 1970s, footage of a theatre play based on Johann Nestroy and a rare artefact: an 8mm film...
In collage sequences, the surrogate of synthetic sensuality takes form and seduces the sailors in the guise of a Hawaiian girl. In ritual punctuation, she distributes deaths which seemingly only the hardy siren Fatality can survive.
In Echigo in Japan the snow often lies several feet deep well into May covering landscape and villages. Over the centuries the inhabitants have organised their lives accordingly. In order to record their very distinctive forms of everyday life, their festivals and religious rituals Ulrike Ottinger...
Ulrike Ottinger’s provocative mélange of ethnography, stunning tableaux and baroque vignettes was inspired by what she calls the “well-stocked miracle” of Korean wedding chests, assembled according to time-honored customs. This exploration of love and marriage in South Korea looks closely at...
...Her son-in-law, Ippolit Matwejewitch Worobjaninow, is a former nobleman and a dandy who is currently wasting away as a small town magistrate in charge of civil marriages. He eagerly takes up the quest to find the treasure. Meanwhile, over the years, the twelve chairs have been dispersed all over...
Countdown follows a chronological sequence. The movie was shot in Berlin and environs over a ten-day period leading up to the unification of the currencies on July 1, 1990. The film thus ends on the date marking “the first stage of German reunification”.
In fall 2007 the Women's Film Festival Seoul issued a call that did not promise, like the pirate queen Madame X, "gold, love, and adventure," but something as tempting as the opportunity to film a 15-minute short in Korea, which, assembled as one of six parts of an omnibus production, would open...
Selected industrial and city settings from the three films were documented again for Usinimage and intercut with the corresponding fiction film scenes, in order to give the landscapes a new accent through artistic defamiliarization and condensation. It is an exploration of city architecture, in...
Superbia states "I am pride. The proud root of all evil. I am Superbia, the first of the seven capital sins. I am always the first. The tree of wickedness grows out of me. My six daughters are its forbidden fruit: gluttony, laziness, greed, anger, envy, lust." In this grotesque procession of a...
In 1973, Wolf Vostell, an artist associated with Fluxus, made a happening in which participants were required to perform a series of ritual, obsessive actions, such as “go to the trunk of your vehicle, there open and close the trunk 750 times and 375 times put a white plate in it and take it out...
