Director: Philip Widmann
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Biography: Philip Widmann, born in West Berlin, Germany, in 1980, he studied cultural anthropology, ethnology and American studies at Hamburg University and attended documentary film classes at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg. He has been a member of the independent film collective LaborBerlin since 2009.
Country: Germany
Year: 2012
Synopsis: An afternoon in Athens, September 2011, the sun is low. A film, more than 50 years old.
There is always something being transported, even if the boxes may turn out to be empty.
Goods, means and actors tell stories: metaforai.
A/M Spring Version combines footage shot in Athens shortly before sunset, which were
hand-processed and edited on the same evening, with a re-photographed and animated
travel film from the 1950s. It is a take on an excerpt from Michel de Certeau’s influential
Walking in the City. The passage reads: »In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass
transportation are called metaforai. To go to work or come home, one takes a metaphor – a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organise places: they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.«
Produced by Goethe-Institut Athens as part of Hand Over Cinema, a workshop organized by LabA in cooperation with LaborBerlin e.V.
Language: English