Marian Mayland

A curator, an archivist, a gallery owner, a relative: in staged situations, four people describe their relationship to an artist who posed as a Holocaust victim with an invented biography.

The world is not always beautiful, my mother says. My child wakes up. My parents smile at each other and recount – The house in which my mother never wanted to live, my uncle’s mental illness, which my grandparents never wanted to face, the nuclear war that never arrived. They speak of unrealized intentions. To be sterilized, to take one’s own life, to pack up and leave.

Abandoned spaces of adolescence in films and series from the previous century. The light is still on, technical devices switched on, control lamps flashing, PC keyboards are waiting for input. The protagonists are missing. A narrator has investigated what has become of them since they left these film spaces.

In August 1984 a house inhabited by migrant workers was burnt down in Duisburg, killing seven members of a family. While the police immediately ruled out racism as a reason, the survivors continue to doubt that it was a coincidence that their house was set on fire.

Essen, Germany. Two obsolete apparitions: Super 8mm film stock, Kodachrome K40, exposed 30 years past its expiry date – and the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). A short film on the human tendency to find patterns in noise. A film on conspiracy theory, on the state of the left, and on how ideology is transported through the selection of seemingly neutral facts. The title alludes to the NPDs former national chairman, who, since leaving the party in 2013, owns a bar in Palma.