Over the past decade, European filmmakers have provided valuable insights into the changing social and cultural geography of the continent. They have been dealing with questions of migration and new cultural diversities. They have made road movies, transecting Europe and connecting once dislocated places together. They have been concerned with the growing significance of cities, for cities provide the spaces where new complexities and forms of cultural encounter and transformation are at their most intense. Through their cinematic journeys, they have given visibility to the new inter-urban nexus criss-crossing the European space - from Berlin to Istanbul, from London to Mumbai, from Vienna to Belgrade. In their different ways, these films challenge us to think about the possibilities that might be inherent in the new mobilities and cultural encounters in and across Europe. However, they also address power relations as well as the different experiences of people travelling to and across Europe, and thus explore the differences between privileged and marginalised migrants.
It is a central aim of this event to artistically and discursively widen the mental horizons of the European imagination and to open up a new perspective on urban spaces such as Berlin and others. The films are to demonstrate the degree to which cities in Europe are by now connected with other places, languages, histories and modes of perception that point beyond territorial identities. Europe in Motion is thus a forum for a new, transnational kind of filmmaking. The film series presents:
- Films on urban topographies: films that reveal the transformation of urban spaces and of locality through transnational influences, as well as the new kinds of boundaries now separating life worlds from one another within cities
- Films on migrations: films that address the everyday realities of movement of people across frontiers in Europe, transmigrations, relocations, and the social and cultural challenges they bring up
- Films on mobility/ road movies: films that cross Europe and link formerly distant or marginalized places to each other, that widen the imaginary geography and topography of Europe
- Films of de-familiarisation: films that render strange what is taken for granted, that undermine stereotypes and thus open up a new, critical perspective on naturalized concepts such as national belonging and frontiers
