Festival Films A-Z

pong
Skalitzer Str.62
10997 Berlin
Deutschland
Tel./Fax: + 49 30 61 07 60 98
E-Mail: info@pong-berlin.de
Internet:
www.pong-berlin.de

Philip Scheffner, Astrid Marschall

Philip Scheffner

pong
Skalitzer Str. 62
10997 Berlin
Deutschland
Tel.: +49 30 61 07 60 98
Fax: +49 30 61 07 60 98
Internet: www.pong-berlin.de
E-Mail: info@pong-berlin.de

Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek e.V.
Karl Winter
Potsdamer Straße 2
10785 Berlin
Tel.: +49 30 26 95 51 50
Fax: +49 30 26 95 51 11
E-Mail: verleih@fdk-berlin.de

Synopsis

"There once was a man. This man came into the European war. Germany captured this man. He wishes to return to India. If God has mercy, he will make peace soon. This man will go away from here."
Mall Singh's crackling words are heard as he spoke into the phonographic funnel on 11th December 1916 in the city of Wünsdorf, near Berlin. 90 years later, Mall Singh is a number on an old shellac record in an archive - one amongst hundreds of voices of colonial soldiers of the First World War.
The recordings were produced as the result of a unique alliance between the military, the scientific community and the entertainment industry. In his experimental search The Halfmoon Files, Philip Scheffner follows the traces of these voices to the origin of their recording. Like a memory game - which remains incomplete right until the end - he uncovers pictures and sounds that revive the ghosts of the past. His protagonists\' words intersect along the concentric spirals the story follows. Those who pressed the record button on the phonographs, on photo and film cameras, were the ones to write official history. Mall Singh and the other prisoners of war of the Halfmoon Camp disappeared from this story. Their spirits and ghostly appearances seem to play with the filmmaker, to ambush him. They pursue him on his path, to bring their voices back to their home countries.
"The Halfmoon Files is a gift - a generous gift and an invitation. An invitation to journey to distant lands that turn out to be very close after all, to seek the unexpected, to listen to the noises of an old barrack or a landscape that gradually emerges from the fog, and to observe closely the many possible images of a voice. A film as an invitation to follow ghosts and at the same time a modest but nonetheless intense call to think. In the beginning, everything seems very simple and clear, but soon we are beleaguered: by ghosts, by voices, by many stories, and finally by strategies and the power of history. In the end everything is very different than expected - and that is a good thing, too.
The Halfmoon Files also poses a challenge to the genre of the documentary film. The documentary material animates us to spin tales, and our notion of the real is pushed to expand the limits of what can be thought possible. What is political about this film lies equally in seeing, hearing, sensually experiencing, and thinking. And even without specific notes about current political strategies in the course of historiographies, we definitely notice that many places are haunted."
(Nicole Wolf, Festival catalogue of the "International Forum of New Cinema" 2007)

Biography

scattered frequencies (2002), a/c (2003), ES Express (2003), the making of ?my brother nikhil (2004), From Here To Here (2005), India in Mind (2006)

Filmography

scattered frequencies (2002), a/c (2003), ES Express (2003), the making of ?my brother nikhil (2004), From Here To Here (2005), India in Mind (2006)

Dates

38	05.10.2007	17:00	Filmhaus
77	07.10.2007	19:30	Filmhaus