English title: Berlin Air
Director: Riki Kalbe
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Biography: Riki Kalbe (born September 20, 1941 in Wuppertal, died January 2, 2002 in Berlin) was a filmmaker and photographer. She loved concrete things, discovering metaphorical universes in them, she invented the feminist hacker, anticipating reality, she researched ordinary stories and dedicated herself to hidden memory, always pursuing the question of how memory is possible at all. Between 1976 and 1998 she shot 15 films, some of them in collaboration with Barbara Kasper and others. In 2006 her films were shown at Arsenal cinema on the occasion of an exhibition of her photographs. She had spent a great deal of time there, both as spectator and as filmmaker. In the sensitive way that she brought things together and her excitement for ideas, she also functioned as a programmer. To express her long-term association with the Arsenal, she left her entire body of filmic work to the archive there. Her photographic estate is held at the Akademie der Künste.
Riki Kalbe was a collector of stories and pictures. She was connected by friendship with many people who lived and worked in Berlin (East and West) and elsewhere. She supported her friends in many respects, for instance, by generously sharing in their ideas and projects. This DVD is meant to make her films available to a wider audience.
Riki Kalbe was a person with a big heart, who could be passionate and restless, but also searching and vulnerable, someone who listened first and spoke afterwards, and, perhaps unintentionally, had an infectious effect with her ideas. Riki was a master at researching and not-letting-up. She never kept her excitement to herself, the fire got to you, the spark was smouldering, and before you knew it you were pulled into her stories.
(Lothar Heinke, “Obituary for Riki Kalbe,” Der Tagesspiegel February 8, 2002)
Director: Barbara Kasper
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Biography: Barbara Kasper studied at the Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie (dffb) in Berlin. Since 1977 she works as a Producer and filmmaker. Her documentaries won selveral awards. She also was a scholar for Film and Videoart at the University of Fine Arts (UdK) in Berlin.
Country: Germany
Year: 1996
Synopsis: The film tells of different air-qualities in Berlin in three decades and, in parallel, of the inventors of a souvenir, who, first in Berlin and then in Lübeck, filled cans with Berlin Air. (Production Note)
Language: German
