Night Recedes

Born in Berlin in 1896, Lotte Eisner became famous for her passionate involvement in the world of both German and French cinema. In 1936, together with Henri Langlois, she founded the Cinémathèque Française with the goal of saving from destruction films, costumes, sets, posters, and other treasures of the 7th Art. A Jew exiled in Paris, she became a pillar of the capital's cultural scene, where she promoted German cinema.

Filmmaker Timon Koulmasis, a 33-year-old filmmaker, wanted to understand why his childhood friend's mother became a terrorist and how she, herself an orphan who never recovered from her loss, abandoned her daughters. Ulrike Marie Meinhof is an intimate portrait of a woman whose name became taboo in her family for twenty-five years. The film consists of amateur footage, texts written by the journalist, her public and television appearances, and, above all, testimonies from her loved ones, punctuated with archival documents, to better reveal the profound disconnect between the woman and the superficial image of her portrayed by her era. She is neither the bloodthirsty caricature denounced by the media nor the “martyr” described by some activists.

With the German Occupation in Greece (1941-1944) as a background, this film tells the love story between my father, an assistant professor at the mysterious German Scientific Institute of Athens - financed by the occupying power, Germany, but in reality a refuge for resistant students - and Nelly, a young student in Fine Arts. The film also traces the portrait of their friend Rudolf Fahrner, founder of the Institute, comrade of the Stauffenberg Brothers and one of the few conspirators of the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, on 20 July 1944, that survived the repression that followed.

Images of labor and unemployment in present-day Greece. Athens, Perama, Thessaloniki, Skouries… "Block after block, the liquidation of the world goes on" (René Char). Instances of rupture with what used to define the world of work until now, as well as the momentum created by those who fight.

A march, a synthesis of demonstrations in Paris. Organized from below, without hierarchy or privilege, the Yellow Vests movement takes shape there as a new political experimentation. A fictional text accompanies images of the spaces of action and debate that opened up. As we experience them, the events are as powerful as in the best fictions.