An exploration of one of the most original voices in German cinema today, Daniel Kötter's wandering cinema of globalisation.
A constellation of 14 mysterious, ever-shifting works by the German artist-filmmaker Daniel Kötter can now be found in the DAFilms orbit. These films are a unique experience for audiences, ranging across continents and timezones, refracted through a panoply of stylistic approaches. In the six-part state-theatre series his gaze turns to urban theatres and performance halls, abandoned or occupied, in Lagos, Tehran, Berlin, Beirut, and others. Chinafrika.mobile takes as its subject the life cycle of a mobile phone, from its birth in the mines of the Congo, to its manufacture in Chinese factories in the Pearl River Delta, to its use and death in the markets and recycling dumps in Lagos, Nigeria.
As a filmmaker, Kötter is not afraid of traversing the lines that divide mediums, as we see for example in the single-shot Neues Theater. His work steps across these generic boundaries as freely as his subjects traverse well-worn roads and the towns and estates they call home. In Hashti Tehran, Tehran itself comes to represent a house in our minds, whether we know the city or not; the film looks at four very different areas in the outskirts of the Iranian capital: the mountain of Tochal in the north, the area around the artificial lake Chitgar in the West, the construction of social housing called Pardis Town in the far east, and the neighbourhood Nafar Abad at the southern edges of the city.
You can now delve into a curated selection of Kötter's work in various shapes and forms of cinema, venturing into a world governed by its own rules and concerns.
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