about brandfilme

 "I think that this administrative, conservative and profit-oriented thinking basically destroys all areas of life. There are certainly moments when you can fit into existing orders without loss, but there are also moments when you have to clearly reject it. We should definitely preserve this freedom. But if one gives it up, then one should not make films, because then one actually has nothing to say".
Ulrike Ottinger, workshop talk in Filmbulletin 4/96

brand means fire

brandfilme is a free media platform  for activist and artistic films on the climate crisis and its underlying violent relations and was founded by video artist Susanne Fasbender in the wake of the release of the film trilogy BRAND(Fire) in 2018.

brandfilme is made by activists who address the broad spectrum of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist topics in their own authorship and realize them with the help of a wide variety of voices and interviews. brandfilme creates a framework of reflection for condensed political debate with traveling film screenings.

It is also about struggling for the maintenance of free activist and autonomous approaches to the production itself, e.g. in the way time and resources go into the making of the films in the daily practice of life. It is about a freedom in filmmaking that is worth fighting for and that arises from daily confrontation. Connected to the history of video art, originally rooted in the critique of the mass medium television, Susanne Fasbender & brandfilme combine documentary, thinking and positioning with acoustic atmosphere, slowness or expelled subjective interludes in their films. Listening to the film is the ground on which the montage animates the images. In contradiction to the prevailing term "talking heads" in documentary film, which for them sums up the "misery of exploitation", interviews become a central anchor of their work: presence and proximity of the individual in conversation and autonomy of the subject: thinking, knowing, feeling - the individual in its manifoldness.

Today, brandfilme consists of two permanent members, who are temporarily joined by other activists for specific periods or activities.

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