Festival motto
Be water, my friend
This year's motto "Be water, my friend" defines the aura of both the festival and its special programme. Quoting Martial Arts-superstar Bruce Lee, we place the element of water at the core, as a mental figure, as a connecting form for the rifts in our society – because climate change, war, capitalism, fascism, and patriarchy are the rifts causing our world, dried out by droughts, to burst. We can only fill the rifts through a change of paradigms in the way we think and act. In this way, we think of the Filmwinter as a space for exchange and the presentation of prototypes of new social conceptions.
Be water, my friend. Following the science philosopher Donna Haraway's call of "Making Kin", we ask: which new forms of friendship do we need? How can we strike up a kinship with all living creatures, things, technologies, and outdated dualisms and dissolve encrusted ideas to bin the existing rifts together anew?
Be water, my friend. To do this, we turn to Astrida Neimanis' hydro-feminist philosophy and understand our festival and its special programme as "Bodies of Water" – the title of her book –, as the connecting element water. In this way, our festival should be a condensate from the ocean of binding forms that we create and explore with artists, curators, cooperation partners, and the audience, a fresh rain shower that flows through our venues to enliven and wash around our audience.
"I only want to see you bathing in the purple rain" is what Prince sang 30 years ago. We extend this wish with the closing words of the author Kim de l'Horizon from their article "Männlichkeit, Krieg und ganz viel Liebe" (Masculinity, war and a lot of love) in the newspaper TAZ of December, 31st, 2022: "A lot of purple rain to you."
