Fabian Altenried

Objet A

Ingeborg and Adam live and work together as hand surgeons. Ingeborg is a kleptomaniac. During a fit, she hurts her ankle and gets a walking aid. As she becomes attached to her new sensitive body part, envious Adam finds his own object of desire. While exploring their objectophilias, the mysterious Melanie begins working for them. She has unusually wild armpit hair, and she uses dried mushrooms to soak up her sweat with. Gradually, she lures the couple into a surreal dialogue with nature.

Life Is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning

If history is written by the victors, where does that leave those who were never allowed to be part of the game? A collective of queer athletes enters the Olympic Stadium in Athens and sets out to honour those who were excluded from standing on the winners’ podium. They meet Amanda Reiter, a trans* marathon runner who has to struggle with the prejudices of sports organisers, and Annet Negesa, a 800m runner who was urged by the international sports federations to undergo hormone-altering surgery. Together they create a radical poetic utopia far from the rigid gender rules found in competitive sports.

Sirens

Monolithic power plants; billowing columns of smoke; the backdrop of a red sun. Sirens is an experimental short documentary that captures Germany’s coal-fired power plants in their final years of generating energy. Shot entirely from helicopters, the film takes us on a journey through industrial wastelands, thus recalling the passage of Ulysses’ boat through the Sirens’ strait. An odyssey through the dystopian industrial world that has left a permanent mark on earth’s ecosphere.

Two Stones

Let’s embark upon a journey to discover two collective housing projects. One in Kharkiv, Ukraine, from the early days of the Soviet era in 1930; the other, in the suburbs of Rotterdam, in the 1950s. Their connection? Lotte Stam-Beese, the first woman to train as an architect at the Bauhaus, who took part in both ventures. Two political and social spaces for two different architectural utopias. The film unfolds stories and expands them with well-informed, militant explanations, as we go back and forth, sometimes imperceptibly, from one city to another, from past to present, in a delicate weaving operation. As a game of transfer and echoes, of viewpoints opening up a counter-History, in reverse, as suggested by the superimpositions the film is peppered with. A journey through the bends of places, History, words, punctuated by the apparitions of an interpreter who translates as much as she comments, in a whispering voice, as a ghostly narrator.