“Pandora’s Box” is the festival’s feminist container, in which films and video installations by international artists are shown. Created as a place of documentation and confrontation with the artistic reality during the Corona lockdowns, “Pandora’s Box” is now entering its fifth year on the theme of “SAFER SPACES – The Feminist Culture of Peace”. Are you ready to explore its content? Then climb the steps to its tin wall, follow the breeze that moves the entrance and enter a space between fiction and reality. After an initial exploration of the various peace and conflict dialogues as well and other confrontations in the space, you can take a comfortable seat and stay, look, ask and marvel as long as the gifts from “Pandora’s Box” hold you under their spell.
Curated by Edith van den Elzen
Artists:
Anja Plonka – Breathing Gaia
Apollonia Duijster – Vieze Vingers (Filthy Fingers)
Barbara Santos – ASH WEDNESDAY
Cecília Amado – All the Girls from Bahia
Daria (Daša) Vorobeva – Prima
Deborah Manavi – Standing Here With You
Edith Buttingsrud Pedersen – In Venus
Edith van den Elzen & Julia Panzer – Medusa
Maria Kobzeva – CTRL_R
Mareike Heeneman – Über den Schatten Springen (Acting out of Character)
Mary Moynihan – No More War; Courageous Women
Matilde Amigo Fernández – Believe II
Nasheeka Nedsreal & Yatri Niehaus – Memories of Reincarnated Imaginings
Pleun Gremmen – Fishtank
Silvana Sarti – Ondas Longuinquas (Longuing waves)
profikollektion: Hexen (er)finden (Finding witches)
Anja Plonka M.A. explores the fields of performance, choreography and film in transdisciplinary works. Her works are search movements: Somatic practices open up the field of performative research for her and move the body as an archive of traumatic memories.
Breath and somatic practice are used as vehicles to connect the physiology of Gaia with the body of the performer. They enter into co-regulation through resonance. The inscriptions of trauma in the body attempt to transform themselves through the quivering cells. In the breath, as a solidary connection between Gaia and the performer’s body, patriarchal structures and pain seek to transform themselves. This network of relationships calls for a caring and sensitive future in which we act in the knowledge of our interconnectedness through our breath. How can we speak through our vulva again?
2023
Länge: 8 min
Language: CC English
Apollonia Duijster (1995) is a filmmaker who delves into the intimate and often unspoken aspects of the human experience, creating films in which women openly discuss masturbation and men openly explore their emotions and tears. Her cinematography uses tight framing to “capture” her subjects, ensuring that they confront and engage with her probing questions.
In Vieze Vingers (Filthy Fingers), filmmaker Apollonia Duijster condemns the taboo of masturbation among girls. By having friends talk about it, she tries to find out how far one can go in sharing this information. She also asks: Is masturbation weird or dirty, or does everyone do it? In just 15 minutes, a big problem is dealt with in a humorous way.
2016
Length: 16 min
Language: Dutch, CC English
Bárbara Santos, playwright, director, actor, author, screenwriter, filmmaker, and feminist anti-racist activist Bárbara Santos is the artistic director of the KURINGA theater space in Berlin and founder of Magdalena International –Teatro de las Oprimidas– Network in Latin America, Africa and Europe. She has developed innovative aesthetic approaches that address the intersection of gender, race and class and has written three books on the subject.
The last day of Carnival is coming to an end in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. The presence of the military, which has lasted for more than thirty years, is a constant companion in everyday life, and the sound of gunfire can be heard again and again. Demétria is waiting for her daughter Cora, her only child, to come home from school. Meanwhile, a brutal police raid takes place in her neighborhood. As night falls and Demétria clings to the fading hope of finding her daughter, she is visited by three people in a row: a policeman, the local priest, and the governor of the state. Each plays a different role in the seemingly endless war between the people and the military.
2023
Length: 30 min
Language: Brasilian/Portuguese, CC English
Nana and Shayres are indigenous Pataxó girls from Santa Cruz de Cabrália, in the south of Bahia (Brazil). They have just turned 15. Nana is fighting to save the traditions of her village, Reserva da Jaqueira, and wants to become an indigenous journalist. Shayres, who lives in the urban village of Coroa Vermelha, learned the values of indigenous education from her grandmother and tells us his version of the “discovery” of Brazil.
year 2022/ Brazil
Length:24 minutes
color
Language: Brasilian/Portuguese, CC English
Daša (Moscow, 1999) is a director, writer, and editor. In 2022, she made a fiction film debut with the film Prima, starring ballet legend Mikhail Lavrovsky. She lives in Vienna (Austria) and curates a film festival, devoted to showcasing shorts by women, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender people filmmakers. In 2024, she participated in a Film Campus of Diametrale Festival in Innsbruck.
https://www.instagram.com/dariasparrow01/
The short film Prima is a fictional debut film from the year 2022. It tells the story of a ballet dancer (Marina) who is trying to get back on stage after a car accident. She wants to prove herself to the artistic director (Igor) of a theatre where her best friend (Sasha) was given the leading role. Igor is not impressed with Marina’s efforts, and Sasha comes up with a secret plan to help her.
2022
Length: 15 min
Language: Russian, CC English
Deborah Manavi is a freelance dancer and choreographer. She is also a dance teacher and dance therapist (in training). Her artistic practice is informed by an understanding of dance as a transformative force for social change. Her art is a way of understanding the world and making it understandable. Since 2023, she has been intensively exploring themes of migration, transculturality, home, collective trauma and dance as a form of resistance.
www.deborah-manavi.com
Instagram:@debby.manavi
Standing here with you was created in June 2023 as an act of solidarity with the women of Iran. The dance film was produced as part of the Baháʼí International Community’s global campaign, #OurStoryIsOne, to commemorate the murder of 10 Baháʼí women in Shiraz 40 years ago and the ongoing oppression of all women in Iran. 22 women in Kassel, Germany, came together to find individual and collective expression in response to the protests since September 2022 and the decades-long oppression of women in Iran. To become visible for those who are not allowed to be seen, to dance for those who are not allowed to dance, to connect with each other so that we are not alone with the feeling of helplessness. For women, life, freedom! And for hope.
2023
Length: 7 min
Language: non-verbal / English
Dance and co-creation: Lily Bromley, Simone Reimer, Lena Kühnel, Patricia Kriese, Josefine Strehle, Mira Klepfer, Josefine Malakçi, Katja Mand, Angelika Schmitt-Rößer, Justyna Staszczak, Massumeh Rasch, Mareike Steffens, Klara Koraus, Paula Schulze, Kerstin Rohwer, Anette Hänning, Nazanin Esmaeilisedeh, Kristina Langholf and others.
Concept, Choreography, Direction, Editing, Sounddesign: Deborah Manavi
Edith is a choreographer and dancer based in Berlin. She is co-founder of the collective Company HAA. Her latest works include Elefanten in Blutadern (Elephants in Blutadern), 8+ at Schäxpir Festival 2023 in Linz, Woyzeck for Radu Stanca National Theatre, for which she was nominated as Best Director at the Uniter Gala 2024 and Passion for the Contemporary Ballet Company Cisne Negro in Sao Paolo, which has premiered at Sesc Consolasao in May 2024. Her first dance films were In Venus (2022) and Os, Ingen (2021), both nominated for the best experimental film and shown at film festivals around the world. Edith has also been awarded the Peter, Ingrid og Ralph Hernöe`s Fond Honorary Scholarship in recognition of her work as a dance artist.
Instagram : edith.b.p
In Venus is a short dance film set in a sunlit, milky universe. Four women in wedding dresses and pastel colors move through a sports field, the cover of a magazine, a laundromat, and somewhere with their limbs in the clouds overlooking the city. The expression of the music and the movement contrasts with the pastel aesthetics as it subtly defies expectation. It is based on the need of 4 characters to question their own identity as women and their relationship to desire and shame. It reflects on the moments of growing up when we lose some of our innocence and fluidity. We realize shame. A change in the gaze of the other. Our sexuality, our need to objectify or be objectified. Our need to be good, respectful, respectable, desirable, and our need to be anything but. Throughout the movie, we as viewers are confronted with the shame and stigma of the female body. At the same time, we are brought to a state of simplicity and childlike purity in physical presence.
2022
Length: 28 min
Language: non-verbal
Edith Buingsrud Pedersen: Director
Anela Luzi: Dancer
Sarah Plattner: Dancer
Julia Stiegler: Dancer
Edith Buttingsrud Pedersen: Dancer
Turi Agostino: Music Composer
Lea Bethke: D.O.P
Lea Bethke & Edith Buttingsrud Pedersen: Editing
Gyan Ros Zimmermann:
Best Boy
Edith van den Elzen is a video artist who finds inspiration and material in nature, from close-ups of small details to wide landscapes. She often works in collectives, collaborating with musicians, performers and other visual artists, where improvisation plays an important role, using spatial objects or creating this three-dimensional effect with projections. She also documents creative theatre processes or workshops with a calm and observing eye, using music and soundscapes captured in the moment and finding the story through images rather than textual explanation. Edith studied film and video art at the art academy, where she also experimented with painting, photography and conceptual art. Recently she has been connecting performance more with the creative process.
Julia Panzer is a versatile cellist who is always on the lookout for new expressive and tonal possibilities for her instrument. During her studies in Leipzig, she deepened her passion for cross-genre music-making by founding the neoclassical “mondëna quartet”, in which she collaborated with exciting artists such as Sven Helbig, Felix Meyer, Felix Rösch etc. In December 2022, the first quartet album “Circles” was released, which was nominated four times for the Opus Klassik. Classical orchestral music also plays a major role in Julia’s life: she has already played in the MDR and hr symphony orchestras and at the Staatstheater Darmstadt and is a committed member of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie. With her Loop-Station and her solo project “Repetition”, she creates transcendent meditative moments and subtly moves between ambient, minimal music, folk and classical music.
A musician and a visual artist find their call to nature. Call and answer of images and sounds, cellist Julia works with a loopstation to find repetition and new expressive possibilities for her classical instrument. Video artist Edith works with a collection of images created over the last few years, mostly shot in nature, and tells a story through color and silence. Both extend the opposing media to a higher performative level, using more senses than just hearing or seeing.
Language:non-verbal
Maria is a choreographer, dance artist and teacher from St.Petersburg. She began her journey in ballet, graduating from the Vaganova Ballet Academy and joining the St Petersburg Ballet Theatre early in her career. Driven by her curiosity for different styles of movement, Maria expanded her expertise by studying contemporary dance, earning a BA from the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt. She is currently exploring various artistic mediums, collaborating on and creating projects for both theatre and film.
CTRL_R is an interdisciplinary dance film that intersects technology, dance, film, and site-specific performance, exploring the complex relationship between humans and surveillance technologies. While envisioning dystopian futures, CTRL_R also imagines creative and playful possibilities for more-than-human coexistence. Two performers interact with a drone, navigating different realities and landscapes where technology is already deeply embedded. Through this interplay, CTRL_R raises questions within dance about control, the loss of control, and the potential for coexistence with emerging technologies.
2021
Length: 10 min
Language: non-verbal
Mareike Heenemann was born in Berlin, Germany. Her first contact with the aerial arts was in a children’s circus at the age of 9, followed by a professional qualification at Die Etage Berlin. She also studied anthropogeography, which helped her to implement social circus projects in peripheral regions of the world. She has worked for theatre companies, as a freelance artist and developed a solo trapeze theatre piece about autism, proposing a “cultural exchange” between neurotypical and neurodivergent worlds. In 2023, she produced the short film “Über den Schatten springen” (Acting out of character) as a continuation of her theatre piece.
The artistic short film Über den Schatten springen (Acting out of character) is about an autistic aerialist who tries to find her way in the world. It shows the difficulties that not only but especially women have to face in order to survive in a society that is still ignorant about neurodivergence, but also the opportunities of being different.
Social norms are questioned and alternatives of co-existence are shown, so that finally a “cultural exchange” between the world of neurotypical and neurodivergent people becomes possible. The intended audience is quite broad, as the film not only contains an empowerment component for those affected, but also educates.
DE 2023
Length: 14 min
Language: Deutsch, CC Englisch
Mary Moynihan is an award-winning writer, director, theatre and filmmaker, an interdisciplinary artist creating work to promote the arts, human rights, climate justice, gender equality, diversity and peace. Mary is the Artistic Director of Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality and works collaboratively with artists and organisations across Ireland, Northern Ireland and internationally, using the arts to promote rights and values for all.
https://www.facebook.com/smashingtimescentre
https://www.instagram.com/smashingtimes/
No More War is a performance art film and a creative, fictional re-imagining of moments from the life of German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) who spoke out against war and tyranny through her art and was known for her prints, woodcuts and sculptures, and their compassionate portrayal of human suffering and hardship, especially during wartime. In the film, Käthe painfully remembers her youngest son, Peter, who was killed in 1914. While Käthe never got over her son’s death, she became a pacifist after his death and went on to use her art to speak out against war.
2021
Length: 6 min
Language: English
Mary Moynihan is an award-winning writer, director, theatre and filmmaker, an interdisciplinary artist creating work to promote the arts, human rights, climate justice, gender equality, diversity and peace. Mary is the Artistic Director of Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality and works collaboratively with artists and organisations across Ireland, Northern Ireland and internationally, using the arts to promote rights and values for all.
https://www.facebook.com/smashingtimescentre
https://www.instagram.com/smashingtimes/
Courageous Women is a short film by Mary Moynihan that was on display at the Valentia Island Heritage Centre (Ireland) from July 24 to August 31, 2023. The film is an imagined re-creation of moments in the lives of women in Irish history from 1916 to 1923, inspired by the stories of Constance Markievicz (1868-1927); Helena Molony (1884-1967); Margaret Skinnider (1893-1971); Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (1877-1946) and Eva Gore Booth (1870-1926).
2021
Length: 18 minutes
Language: English
Matilde combines knowledge with sensitivity through listening and genuine revelation. She develops transdisciplinary research with diverse teams to challenge “consensual” approaches to information. Her work has been exhibited at La Casa Encendida, Koppel X, Feria Barcú, Cinemateca de Bogotá, Festival LOOP, among others. She holds a Masters in Scenic Practice and Visual Culture (Museo Reina Sofía/Universidad Castilla la Mancha, 2020), a Dance Pedagogy degree (ARCIS, Chile, 2010), and studies in art, technology, and Chinese medicine.
matildeamigo.com
BELIEVE II is an audiovisual capsule that is part of the MARCIAL project, which supports a space for imagining, thinking and mobilizing planetary issues based on the idea of a future on Mars. The BELIEVE capsule video series is a training for the possibility of traveling to the planet Mars (and also for the future of an Earth in crisis). Mars works as a place where we could go – even if we never do – and pushes us to explore and prepare other ways of living.
Marcial is committed to low-cost, feminist and Latin American science fiction, and to the re-appropriation of martial techniques to subvert the paradigm of colonial patriarchy, allowing different stories to emerge against the hegemonic ones installed by NASA, Elon Musk, the USSR, among others.
2021/Chile
Length: 10 min
Subtitles: English
Director and performer: Matilde Amigo Fernández Audiovisual Director: Jose Jimenéz
Assistant director: Ricardo Montt and María José García
Music: Futuro Fósil
Nasheeka Nedsreal is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer whose work explores topics related to identity, futurism, play and improvisation. Her creative journey is underpinned by a commitment to experimentalism and liberation. She is a recent resident artist of Black Rock Senegal, a current member of the Schauspielhaus Zurich Dance Ensemble, and a 2023 recipient of the Berlin Ikarus Prize.
Yatri Niehaus is a filmmaker and theatre director whose work explores themes of identity, environmental awareness and Afrofuturism. He studied at the University of Television and Film Munich and is a fellow of the German Academic Foundation. Recent projects include the documentary Die Farbe meiner Haut (2023), the theatre production ABDRUCKKÖRPER (2021), the video dance project Memories of Reincarnated Imaginings (2021) and the documentary Stella Polaris Ulloriarsuaq (2016).
What’s in a name, a face, a color, a place, a body, a story, a movement? With every curve, every turn, every swing, our myths reveal themselves as truth. Cartographies of the body, etched like memories, generate a becoming as we set fire to fabricated fictions. Tied to and wrapped in the layers of our being, textured territories shift, cracking codes, “unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.” Memories of Reincarnated Imaginings is a short video dance film that explores memory and imagination, power and protest. It is an investigation of the hybrid as a metaphor for inquiry, fluidity and transcendence. It considers the influence of altered states of consciousness and perception as a consequence of the depolarization of boundaries separating self and other, sight and sightlessness, consciousness and unconsciousness.
2021/Germany
Length: 14 min
Language: non verbal
Film by: Nasheeka Nedsreal in collaboration with Yatri Niehaus
Concept and Choreography: Nasheeka Nedsreal
Cinematography: Yatri N. Niehaus
Performers: Gabrielle Curebal and Nasheeka Nedsreal
Costumes: Nasheeka Nedsreal and Gabrielle Curebal
Original Music (original): Fabiano Lima
Editing: Yatri N. Niehaus
Lighting: Timotheus Theisen
Additional Music: Erik Truffaz, Nazar, Abul Mogard
Production Assistants: Samie Blasingame, Laetitia Walendom, Madeline Bass, Cintia Rangel, Djibril Sall
Special thanks: Santix Schwarz
Pleun Gremmen is an artist with a multidisciplinary practice delving into the interplay between emerging digital landscapes and the ancient iconography of the Earth, unraveling how these intertwined realms—virtual and physical—converge to shape and reflect the cultural and political fabric of our world. Pleun engages in storytelling through world-building in multimedia installations using techniques across 3D environments in game engines, AI generation, video, performance and (graphic) design.
Fishtank invites you to dive into a digital aquarium where AI-generated fish glide and transform in mesmerizing ways. Projected onto screens within a container that mimics an actual fish tank, this projection makes waves by blending the natural and technological realms. Echoing the screensavers of the 2000s, it reflects on how media spectacles commodify these elements for profit. As viewers navigate the ebb and flow of these intertwined worlds, Fishtank prompts a splash of reflection on the intersection of entertainment, technology, and nature.
2024
Length: durational
No sound
Silvana Sarti is an Italian-Brazilian visual artist and performer, environmental activist, who lives and works in Sorocaba, São Paulo (Brazil). She uses various art forms such as: drawing, painting, video, audio, textile art, photography. She is an ally of the indigenous American worldview, which understands that everything has a soul.
https://silvanasarti.wordpress.com/
http://silvanasarti.wixsite.com/silvanasarti
Instagram @sartisilva @silvanasarti33 @sostierrabrasil @pedrafolhaonca
Pachamama’s lament echoes in the powerful waves that come from afar in response to human violence against the earth. A living body seems both ethereal and real in its pain of destruction. Peace can only exist in respect for all forms of life, in the harmony of the soul of all things.
2022
Length: 10 min
Language: non-verbal
Filmmaker(s): Silvana Sarti and Giuseppe Laudanna, photo Rosalina Burgos
Katja Kämmerer (visual artist) and Jan Deck (theater maker) founded the artist ensemble profikollektion in 2007. Before that, we worked together in various performative constellations.
We are interested in the aesthetic-artistic exploration of social issues. Our main themes have developed over the years. From biographical, to self-optimization and performing with objects, to increasingly site-specific since 2016.
We call what we are currently doing aesthetic memory work and are thus coining a new term. Art can (may) perform memory work in a way that science and museums cannot. As artists, we work on traces of the past and make them perceivable through various aesthetic means. The historical site is the object of artistic research, it is a carrier, document, witness, mediator of history and at the same time a co-actor.
We work together with fellow artists and thematic experts from a wide range of disciplines and fields.
Between the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, 40,000 – 60,000 people labeled as “witches” or “sorcerers” were interrogated, tortured into making false confessions and executed. Thanks to regional historical research, many of their stories are known today. profikollektion has researched the persecution of witches in Hofheim, Flörsheim and Idstein with site-specific audio walks. These can be heard at the International Women’s*Theater Festival.
Project by & with:
Speakers Cornelia Niemann, Marlene-Sophie Haagen | Sound & Composition Louisa Beck | Artistic Direction Jan Deck & Katja Kämmerer | Sound recordings Stadtarchiv Hofheim: Roswitha Schlecker, Charlotte Pissors, Janina Beseler
The project was initiated by the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain as part of the series “Site Sight Signs” with site-specific works in the region and carried out as a cooperation between the towns of Hofheim, Flörsheim and Idstein.