Official Competition 2019

Ada Kaleh

Helena Wittmann I 2018 I 14'

SYNOPSIS

An indeterminate location, summer. The inhabitants of a shared apartment ask themselves where they might live. They imagine countries, communities and places. Time passes and nothing can change that, neither human action nor objects and their states. At some point, they all drift into a deep sleep.

BIOGRAPHY

Helena Wittmann

HELENA WITTMANN (Germany, 1982). She initially studied Spanish and Media Studies in Erlangen and Hamburg, and then attended the Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK), where she graduated in 2014. His works, including his first feature film DRIFT (2017), Best Film in the Official Competition at the fourth edition of FILMADRID, have been screened internationally at film festivals and exhibitions.

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Critical text

The Ada Kaleh island was a small but important enclave in the middle of the Danube, fiercely contested by Turkey and Austria in the XVIII and XIX centuries, which disappeared under the water in 1970 during the building of a hydroelectrical power plant. The story of this almost legendary place, representative of loss and displacement, hovers over the new film of the German filmmaker Helena Wittmann (winner of 2018 FILMADRID Oficial Competition with DRIFT). With a paused rhythm and cadenced camera movements, Ada Kaleh reveals everyday scenes of a house in which four youngsters imagine new countries and territories, thinking about how a new community in where to live evolves. In 14 minutes of footage Helena Wittman brings into focus, from a more human than politic point of view, the conflict which some youngsters face when they try to imagen the future, their own and maybe also the common one, presenting without judging the adrift course of European youth. NURIA CUBAS

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