Directing
An adaptation based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe.
Oyoyo (1980) is a cine-portrait of an educational internationalism with students from Chile, Guinea-Bissau, the Mongolian Soviet Republic, Cuba and Bulgaria studying economy at the “Hochschule für Ökonomie Berlin- Karlshorst” in the late 1970s. The director is the Indian filmmaker Chetna Vora who mobilizes the film-camera as a means to listen to the problems that the students encounter in their education, what they miss in the GDR, and how they imagine their future. The candid conversational scenes situated in the students’ dormitory in Berlin-Karlshorst alternate with music by Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodriguez, the Brazilian singer Nara Leão and songs in Cape Verdean Créole. As a daughter of a communist communist family from Palitana in Gujarat in India, Chetna Vora came to Berlin in the mid- 1970s to study film at the Konrad Wolf Film Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg.
In long takes with few cuts, women talk about their lives. All the conversations are shot in interior rooms, attesting to trust and great candour. They talk about work, relationships, what’s left of the day, and families – which is naturally political. Chetna Vora began studying directing at the HFF Babelsberg in 1976. Frauen in Berlin would have been her first feature film; however, the HFF broke off production before it was finished, and the negative material was largely destroyed. What remains is a rough version that was secretly filmed on video beforehand, an invaluable and candid document, especially in this form.
