Directing
The film addresses the emotional remnants of the GDR, the symbolism of disposal, isolation, and remediation. Anna Zett processes historical audio and video material from Berlin's "Archive of the GDR Opposition" and combines it with her own recordings, including those of the virtually irremediable landfills of the former chemical industry in Bitterfeld-Wolfen.
Endarchiv examines the symbolic process of disposal and forgetting while raising the question how to take care of the emotional and performative remains of the GDR and its oppositional movements. The film maker Anna Zett is seen spray painting short questions and statements onto large mounds of pebble gravel, where every step leads to a rockslide. The action is interspersed with found footage filmed by Klaus Freymuth, showing demonstrators writing and painting onto the East side of the Berlin Wall shortly after the border was opened in November 1989.
In 1934 Berlin, a Black Jew who is married to a White German is visited by a friend who urges him to flee the country. A screening of a German expressionistic film about a horny Golem resurrected by Mark Zuckerberg is disrupted by a visit of a man from the future.
On a road trip through the dusty heart of the USA a researcher intends to make physical contact with a phantasy, traversinga mythical non-place between East and West, masculine and feminine, material and projection, past and future. Meeting fossil traders, sculptors and scientists on both sides of the American Frontier, they are trying to reconstruct the plot of natural history, the plot of progress. The story ends in the middle, in Rapid City, South Dakota, at the foot of an imported Berlin wall fragment. But the journey continues.
Anna Zett collages mostly unreleased footage from the Berlin Archive of the GDR-Opposition into a pulsating short film thriller. The film opens up an associative realm which allows for the re-evaluation of experiences of violence hard to access today.
