Directing
The accomplishments of four handicapped ten-year-olds are recorded on camera. Their determination to do and create is obvious in each action.
Air raid bunkers represent the architecturally intact remains of World War II. The film looks into their ideological as well as their material texture and puts them into the context of the urban infrastructure of the nineties.
"Cosmodrome" (= Launch pad for space rockets) is a film about the connection between cinema and cosmos. A revolving globe; the distribution logo of the Universal film studio shows the viewer an act of "initiation" taking place in the cosmos - a key image between cinema architecture and cinematic space.
Based on Samuel R. Delany’s short novel ‘Aye, and Gomorrah...’, where the sci-fi premise of radiation-resistant state-neutered space travellers allows the author to explore androgyny, sexual identity, etc. Hammel uses Delany’s story to create a spookily beautiful world where asexual bodies live in the contradiction between their unarousable loneliness and desire for intimacy and contact.
Moves the viewer into the perspective of a foreigner. Mexicans who live in Austria and Austrians who spend their lives in Mexico: through clichés and yearnings - these emigrants create a picture of their countries, and through determining their location, attempt to their identity. They are accompanied by two cinematographers, who also go to a "foreign" place. Their views go along with the narrators and narratives into the respective, other country.
