Gabriele C. Sindler – member of the board of the Screenwriters’ Guild of Germany & COO DFK FILMS – will attend the Diagonale and the discussion
Meet Donat Keusch
Monumental piece of cinema about six Kurdish and Turkish prisoners who try to get their life back on track during a week’s leave from prison. Written by Kurdish director Yılmaz Güney while he was in prison himself. Now, Yol is restored and finally completed.
Yol is the rare film whose production may have been more dramatic than its story. Written while Kurdish director Yılmaz Güney was imprisoned by Turkey’s military junta, Yol was ultimately finished after Güney escaped prison and went into exile. Banned in Turkey until 1999 due to its depiction of Kurdish culture, this story of how five prisoners spent their week of leave won the Palme d’Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.
This newly produced ‘full’ version of the film, YOL – The Full Version, restores the sixth story that was in Güney’s original script, finally realising the late filmmaker’s vision for this legendary work of cinema.
Take on Classics:
Prior to the gripping screening of YOL – The Full Version, moderator Gökhan Yeter takes us into a conversation with producer Donat Keusch and our guest of honour Ahmet Boyacıoğlu. Hear firsthand from Keusch, who has worked with Yılmaz Güney, how the film came about and his personal experiences with Güney.
Donat Keusch discovered the groundbreaking film SÜRÜ (The Herd) in 1979, during a cold Berlin Film Festival, and defied conventional sales channels to secure its distribution. Keusch’s collaboration with Yılmaz Güney’s Güney Filmcilik continued, leading to the successful release of DÜŞMAN (The Enemy) and the monumental project “BAYRAM“. Güney and Keusch’s partnership reached its pinnacle with YOL, a Cannes Film Festival triumph, earning Güney the prestigious Golden Palm in 1982.
Language: English
Event with Tsitsi Dangarembga and Gabriele Sindler
Tsitsi Dangarembga and Gabriele Sindler present their African-European collaboration in the fields of story & script development and creation of films. The aim of their cooperation is to bring relevant and artistically well-presented content to broad film audiences all over the world.
21.03.2023 | 17:00 Uhr
Hadley’s | Beim Schlump 84a | 20144 Hamburg
Further inforamtion @ Website HIAS (Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study).
RSVP: event@hias-hamburg.de
The first edition of AfroBerlin, organised by Yanibes, is a platform for participants to discuss issues with key players in the African film industry and so gather valuable information about the market potential of content by African and Afro-diasporic filmmakers.
The world is in desperate need of ideas how we can progress as humanity. So far, African films have contributed little to this discourse. We will all benefit from engaging with non-dominant imaginaries embedded in their narratives.
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA Trust) has been committed to the improvement of the film industry on the African continent since 2009. Supporting women in the film business is just as important as the promotion of African stories and their authentic storytelling on big screens around the world.
In 2023, Dangarembga’s Harare-based ICAPA Trust launched a pan-African training series for female-dominated creative teams. The kick-off workshop in Lagos, Nigeria, was facilitated by leading script analysts, story & script writing teachers from DFK FILMS | dfk*script*service, led by Gabriele Sindler. The participants and their projects came from Botswana, Kenya, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, São Tomé and Príncipe, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Tanzania and Nigeria.
The workshop series focuses on:
– Development of Stories & Characters
– Analysis of Screenplays & Films
– Exposé | Treatment & Script Writing
– From screenplay to film production & distribution.
The goal of the further training of film professionals is the successful production and international distribution of feature films and documentaries. Furthermore, the participants are enabled to support each other professionally during the development and production of future projects. The aim is to narrate local stories in a way that they will be watched, understood, and discussed by as many people as possible across the globe.
Tstisi Dangarembga and Gabriele Sindler reflect on their practical efforts in the development of globally appealing African stories, scripts and films by systematically and methodically analyzing their intercultural African-European cooperation.
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Lagos Resource Centre | 9 Anifowoshe St, Victoria Island 106104, Lagos, Nigeria
16 PARTICIPANTS | 9 COUNTRIES | 8 PROJECTS
Tsitsi Dangarembga | Gabriele C. Sindler | Donat F. Keusch
The workshop is a training program in story-telling for the screen aimed at African women screen writers who have a compelling project in late development. This training session is partly funded by The Hawthorne Foundation. Gabriele Sindler and Donat Keusch are amongst Europe’s leading script analysts. In a few weeks time, sixteen screenwriters from Africa will benefit from their expertise.
–> Detailed Program Workshop Lagos, Nigeria 2023 (English)
Tsitsi Dangarembga, the founder of ICAPA Trust
Tsitsi Dangarembga, the founder of ICAPA Trust and one of the pioneers of black women’s filmmaking on the continent, met Donat Keusch back in the 1990s while a student at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB). Keusch had been approached to mentor Dangarembga on a script she was writing at the time. The two reconnected recently and are now collaborating on several projects together with Sindler. In addition to a number of feature films, these projects include capacity building initiatives on the African continent. The programmes target women who live in an African country, a group traditionally marginalised in the African film and television industries.
Industry practitioners on the African continent often short change story development due to lack of funding and education opportunities for the process. Yet, script development is arguably the most important part of motion picture development. Keusch advises that a working treatment can easily be 60 or more pages long, with each action vividly imagined and described using all five senses. At the end of the working process the final version of a professional treatment for a normal feature length film will be some 30 to 50 pages, written in prose with no dialogue or at best with indirect speech. Writing the screenplay is faster when the stories and characters have been well-developed and when most of the cinematic solutions are designed. Other aspects of screen writing such as scene building and dialogue follow much more readily.
ICAPA’S call for the Lagos workshop received 93 applications from 24 countries. This response testifies to a widespread market and a deep need for such training activities on the African continent. Stories received ranged from Ugandan sci-fi to Tanzanian experimental coming-of-age. ICAPA Trust expects several films from this year’s workshop to proceed to production, as the Trust is setting up a special vehicle for productions that come out of its training activities.
With a five figure workshop budget and production budgets ranging between a quarter of a million and four million United States Dollars, this kind of work needs supporting. ICAPA Trust is currently fundraising for its other capacity building activities. The Trust has 501 (c) (3) status through its two fundraising partners, Chapel and York and CAF America.
Gifts via Chapel and York may be made by following this link, citing the following details – Account Name: Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust, Account No: CHAPEL906, Service: US Foundation Affiliate
To give via CAF America please download and complete the form here. When completed mail the form, with your gift, to the address on the form, citing The Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust as the organisation you suggest your gift should support.
ICAPA Trust and its many beneficiaries are most grateful for your gift. For more information about the Trust’s African capacity building and production initiatives please email info@icapatrust.com.
PSYCHE & FILM
Cooperation of the C.G. Jung Society Berlin with the Bundesplatz-Kino and dfk*films
Chair: Edith Rosin | Speaker: Donat Keusch * Gabriele Sindler
LARS AND THE REAL GIRL OmU
USA, Kanada 2007 | 106`| script Nancy Oliver | directed by Craig Gillespie
with Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Kelly Garner, Patricia Clarkson…
Lars is shy, lives a secluded life and has never had a woman as he rejects all social contact. A colleague’s flirtation stresses the young man out and triggers an unusual development.
Inspired by a colleague, Lars orders a sex doll and introduces it to his confused brother and his brother’s wife as his girlfriend Bianca, a missionary from Brazil. The brother wants to put him in a psychiatric clinic, but is persuaded by the family doctor to play along and even to involve the whole village. After initial resistance, everyone joins in. Bianca is invited to dinner, participates in community work and reads to the children on a tape recorder. The family doctor calls Lars and his girlfriend in every week, claiming that Bianca is weak from the long journey and needs medical care. In reality, Lars’ trauma is being dealt with: the loss of his mother at birth and growing up without a bond to his father, who is frozen in his grief.
A wonderfully funny film with a great Ryan Gosling, showing a healing process that helps a person into life, a life of social relationships.
About the speakers:
Edith Rosin studied psychology at the Free University of Berlin, trained as an analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute in Berlin, has worked in her own practice since 1996, and has been a lecturer in Active Imagination at the Lindau Psychotherapy Days since 2012.
Donat Keusch studied psychology and journalism. Experience in film distribution, world sales, production and as a lecturer. Most successful film: “YOL” (Golden Palm). Script analyst/consultant/writer under pseudonym for 30 years. “The script is the film!”
Gabriele Sindler Political Scientist | Screenplay Expert | Lecturer
Location: Bundesplatz-Kino | Bundesplatz 14 | 10715 Berlin
Fee: 10,50 € | reduced 9 €
The 10th Anniversary Edition of the SR Socially Relevant™ Film Festival New York is celebrated March 16-31, 2023.
SRFF is a film festival that focuses on socially relevant film content, and human interest stories that raise awareness to social problems and offer positive solutions through the powerful medium of cinema. SRFF believes that through raised awareness, expanded knowledge about diverse cultures, and the human condition as a whole, it is possible to create a better world free of violence, hate, and crime.
SRFF is a non-profit film festival that showcases socially relevant films with human interest stories as a response to the proliferation of violence and violent forms of storytelling. SR™ believes in promoting positive social change through the powerful medium of cinema.
