A road-trip movie across modern-day America in search of sections of the Berlin Wall. The film will be presented by journalist and film critic Yegor Sennikov. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the directors Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez.
The Berlin Wall divided two worlds, two military and political blocks, communism and capitalism. Vae Victis, that is “Woe to the vanquished,” is when the cold war was over, the Wall came down and was turned into a trophy. The American Sector is an exciting documentary full of humor about two filmmakers (one of whom, Pacho Velez, presented his picture The Reagan Show at the 2016 Beat Film Festival) embarking on a trip across the places in the US where segments of the once fearful construction, the Berlin Wall, have been found. The concrete trophy slabs are dispersed across the most bizarre spots: a roadside diner and a hotel lobby, an open field, and the George W. Bush Presidential Library, the town of Eureka and the garden of a Hollywood villa.
Just as ancient ruins formed the basis of the Christian European culture, bits of the Berlin Wall start generating new meanings around them. Against the background of the Wall’s fragment, female students of the University of Virginia reflect on the explicit presence of slave labor used in the construction of their campus; an elderly African-American man says that for him the Wall symbolizes political repressions as does racial legislation, and its destruction meant hope for all the oppressed. The American Sector is a subtly thought-through documentary shot with much aestheticism on 16mm film, where the past rhymes gracefully with the present, and the eternal—with the ephemeral. The Wall, which hasn’t stood for more than thirty years, appears as a universal symbol of the split inherent in this world, especially meaningful in the age of Donald Trump’s migration policy and the turbulent situation in the European Union. The film’s last words are pronounced in Spanish: the Berlin Wall was brought down, but new ones are being erected to replace it.
After the screening, journalist Egor Sennikov will discuss with the authors of the film, Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez, how to work on such a geographically vast documentary, find characters and maintain the observer’s viewpoint.
The American Sector
Dir. Courtney Stephens, Pacho Velez
USA, 2020. 70 min. 16+
The film will be screened in English and German with Russian subtitles.
The Q&A will be in English with simultaneous interpretation to Russian.