Stephanie Cumming

Five people who are in a show at a bar, who live in this hotel and have very different relationships with one another. After the show – they are already sleeping – they are woken by Pan for the night and therefore wake up to the destruction that is held within them.

A series of snapshots from the life of a fictional actress named Shirley serves to weave together thirteen paintings by Edward Hopper (e.g. "Office at Night", "Western Motel", "Usherette", "A Woman in the Sun") into a fascinating synthesis of painting and film, personal and political history. Each station in Shirley’s professional and private life from the 1930s to 1960s is precisely dated: It is always August 28/29 of the year in question, as the locations vary from Paris to New York to Cape Cod.

Opera countertenor Alex Gottfarb is not alone – his inner self is crowded. Some other personae live within him – shy Alexander, sexy Sandra, teenager Lex and a seven-year-old prodigy Xandi. Each one of them has different ideas of what life should look like and yet they are all extremely dependent on each other. With the help of Helene, who loves him, Alex succeeds to get in touch with his cohabitants. Cascades of turbulent events and tragicomic misunderstandings accompany Alex’ struggle for identity, love and freedom.

How are you using my memories? What programs will replace us? Where is my data? At a bank in the year 2051

In the experimental short film PART TIME HEROES film artists Mara Mattuschka and Chris Haring stage a ballet of vanities with retro flair. The search for fame elevator goes up and down and egos bust and boom. Each character is isolated in an anachronistic, film-star dressing room, left alone, subjected to sinister fittings. The golden room with the greatest striptease talent who constantly undresses yet is never naked... The film checks these beings, isolated through their hero competition, into the lonely heart hotel where they eavesdrop on one another through thin walls.

We enter a constructed setting, against the background of a video wall that suggests we are in a restaurant. A Japanese restaurant, as can be concluded from the conveyor belt which forms part of the fittings. Running Sushi consists of a casual conversation between Steffi and Johnny in a sushi restaurant, while the parallel world of thoughts and sensations of both characters takes the stage. Each new dish has major consequences in the grotesque dream reality.

In an occupied establishment - a kind of self-defined sub-cosmos of reality - there is a sensual search for lust and fulfillment taking place. Women and men dance, desire, interact; their perfectly choreographed body game becomes a symbiotic extension of an excessively hedonistic sub- conscious. Amidst it all: a mafia boss seeks to take control of the establishment and finds the meaning of life in the process. Perfect Garden is a fabulously hypnotic film, utopian and realistic all at once

A body junkie: man must lay bare his hidden ingredients, dismantle his body, his integrity, his presence, and his identity in order to create a challenge both physical and metaphysical.

"Stranger Than Paradise," vaguely associatively linked to Jim Jarmusch's wintery Eighties road movie, is a genuinely film-choreographed work: a hybrid, subtly futuristic chamber play for eight people and an investigative camera. Set in sunken moods and deceptive images, this dance film is an elegy that marks the transition from one species to the next. "Stranger Than Paradise" is a reflection of the systematic expansion of the human and animalistic into the mechanical and sometimes their hybrid existence. The body is obsolescent: it is still needed but the preparations for its abolition are in progress.