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Angelika Levi

Angelika Levi

Directing

Biography

Angelika Levi is a research based filmmaker and video artist, working with a range of media – particularly film material, video, audio, photography and text. Angelika Levi lives in Berlin. She studied at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin (dffb). From 1985 on her work has been shown at international film festivals, cinemas, exhibitions and film programs. Her short film Faust auf Auge (1988) won the No Budget Video Prize Hamburg, and Desiree & Polylepis (1994) was rated “high quality” by the German Film Classification Board in Wiesbaden. My Life Part 2, her first full-length documentary, won several awards and had its premiere at the Forum / International Berlin Film Festival 2003. Children of Srikandi had its Premiere at the Panorama / International Berlin Film Festival 2012 and won also several awards. Her last work Miete Essen Seele Auf was shown in the exhibition “Wohnungsfrage” in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, October 23th – December 14th, 2015. In addition to making her own films, Angelika Levi works as a script and dramatic advisor, lecturer and film editor. Films and videos are distributed by Arsenal Distribution – Institut for Film and Video Art.

Known For

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From September 2001 to April 2002 Nan and Nancy along with other Latin American women worked for the asbestos company “Branch,” cleaning the luxury apartments, offices, and banks of Manhattan in the hermetically sealed zone of “Ground Zero.” The women had neither residence permits nor work permits in the USA, and their dust masks had no filter for asbestos. At the PedWest border crossing in Tijuana refugees perform their stories. They play asbestos workers, American soldiers, Red Cross staff, and firefighters. Migrants from Guatemala and Venezuela and Mexicans who were deported from the USA to Tijuana: they are all stuck at the border due to the “Remain in Mexico” policy. Ahorita Frames moves the stories of the asbestos workers from New York in 2001 across the border to Tijuana in 2019, thus reconfiguring the political cartography of power relations.

Ahorita Frames

2021Movie
Taste of Hope

The workers of a self-managed tea factory decide to go against the grain and play by their own rules. The problem is, how can you plan, work and survive in a world driven by ruthless competition? One day at a time, for instance. In a world ruled by profit and dominated by the exploitation of the weaker ones, the film literally offers an alternative set of ways about how to think our future and the means and tools to work for it. It is not an easy job but, as Taste of Hope carefully and precisely shows, there is still a lot that can be done if we change our relationship to production and labor. Instead of making grand gestures or political statements, the filmmaker works with the camera and with a thoughtful editing in order to understand how to weave together new possibilities of communal existence.

Taste of Hope

2019Movie
Absent Present

Benji was brought from Namibia to the GDR in 1979 as a young child and sent back in 1990 after German reunification. Levi got to know him there in 1991. Two years later, he hitchhiked back to Europe disguised as a tourist. But "in this film there is no main character. Benji, who should have been it, has disappeared," it is stated at the beginning of the movie. On her search for traces, Levi associatively links the story of the refugee with the stories of flight of those she meets underway. The journey leads from Germany to Namibia, to the Spanish mainland and the Canary Islands, all the way to Senegal. Without wanting to draw a geographical or political map, an essayistic documentary on the various forms of traveling emerges: vacation and migration, voluntary and forced return.

Absent Present

2010Movie