Tuesday, August 1 – 8:00 P.M. – 10: 00 P.M.
Escuela Nacional de Experimentación y Realización Cinematográfica (ENERC-INCAA)
Pre-Opening Screening + Dialogue between Michael Renov and Thomas Elsaesser

The Sun Island (Thomas Elsaesser, 2017).
Spanish subtitles

This is a film about oincidences, shattered lives and posthumous fame. It is about love and passion, friendship and heartbreak, about history with a capital H and lower-case histories, about Germany between the wars, about an island in Berlin, about environmental protection, sustainability and recycling – before these terms had been properly invented. It is about the dead that unexpectedly speak out among the living, about the reunion with a past whose existence hardly anyone suspected. And it is about the utopian potential of ideas buried in the ground of a tiny marshland island for the past 70 years. The Sun Island is an essay film with voice-over narration, interviews and extracts from correspondences, told collectively but still in a mostly linear and chronological manner. Framed by a personal present-day perspective, it has a flashback construction. At a meta-level, it discusses and problematizes the status of home movies as visible evidence –unreliable and indispensable– but whose unreliability can take on documentary force and authentic presence.