FIREWORKS: HELENA WITTMANN
Helena Wittmann is the most interesting explorer of contemporary cinema. With her two highly successful ‘marine’ feature films Drift and Human Flowers of Flesh, she has succeeded in establishing herself through highly personal formal research and an astonishing, prodigious cinematic gaze.
Her research cinema, which rethinks the essence of places in motion by redesigning their forms, has been able to conceive the exploration of a house or an ocean with the same filmic fascination. A cinema also capable of dialoguing freely and without reverence with the classics of the past, and at the same time creating ‘sentimental’ geographies in which the spectator can have a free experience of not only intellectual but also physical understanding.
The selection:
21,3°C – Helena Wittmann
Germany / 16’ / 2014 / Fiction
Later – Helena Wittmann
Germany / 5’ / 2015 / Fiction
Wildnis – Helena Wittmann
Germany / 12’ / 2013 / Fiction
Ada Kaleh – Helena Wittmann
Germany / 14’ / 2018 / Fiction
Helena Wittmann is an artist and filmmaker based in Hamburg, Germany. After studying Spanish and Media Studies in Erlangen and Hamburg, she graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg (HFBK) in 2014. Her latest feature film HUMAN FLOWERS OF FLESH was premiered 2023 at Locarno Film Festival. Her debut feature DRIFT(2017) and several short films, including ADA KALEH (2018), 21,3°C (2014) or WILDNIS (2013), were shown internationally at various film festivals and in exhibitions. Helena Wittmann works often in collaborations, as with the musician and artist Nika Son, or as DoP for other filmmakers. She has worked as artistic research assistant at HFBK Hamburg until 2018 and was mentoring at Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola in Donostia, Spain.
