This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past

Two young women wander through a mall. They goof around, try on sunglasses, show off for the camera that is recording them on black-and-white Super 8 film and flick through photos of other people striking similar poses. A series of absurdly contradictory desires can be heard on the soundtrack – to predict the past, to rouse the alarm clock from sleep, to forget what one cannot remember. A day like any other, this could be any place, at any time. Then the date on a memorial plaque allows us to place the scene. We are at the Olympia Shopping Centre in Munich, where nine teenagers with an immigrant background were killed and others injured in a racist attack on July 22, 2016. The photos – plucked, as so often in Bilir-Meier's work, from her family archive – show scenes from "Düşler Ülkesi" ("Land of Dreams"), a play Bilir-Meier's mother helped put on whose 1982 premiere was delayed by a bomb scare.

Continuities and ruptures emerge between the everyday lives of migrants then and now, between youthful levity and the persistence of racist violence in Germany.

Source: 72. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)