12th Summer Film Institute + Public Film Festival

June 22-28, 2025

SCREENED ENVIRONMENTS:

Intersections of Built, Natural and Social Spaces in East Germany

UMass Amherst | June 22-28, 2025

Organized and hosted by the DEFA Film Library

Co-directors:

Maria Stehle (Univ. of Tennessee Knoxville)

Stephan Ehrig (Univ. of Glasgow)

PUBLIC FILM FESTIVAL (program)

June 22-27, 2025

>> STREAM <<

(The Distance between You and Me and Her)

The link will be active from June 22-27, 2025

The weeklong institute traces cinematic depictions of urban, rural and industrial spaces to examine how East German films address questions of social and environmental justice at moments of crisis or impasse. The daily screenings and discussions pair East German films with a selection of theoretical readings and contemporary fiction and documentary films. The experience of crisis shown in these films allows us to draw connections to contemporary moments and examine the power of film and visual storytelling for imagining more socially and environmentally just futures.

This residential institute is intended for researchers, curators, educators and graduate students interested in the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary fields of German Studies, Media Studies, Women’s Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Urban Studies. 

CO-DIRECTORS of the Institute:

Maria Stehle, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and German at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, has published four monographs, Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Cultures (2012), Awkward Politics: The Technologies of Popfeminist Activism (with Carrie Smith, 2016), Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary European Cinema (with Beverly Weber, 2020) and Plants, Places, and Power: Towards Social and Environmental Justice in Contemporary German Literature and Film (2023). She has also contributed various book chapters, edited volumes, and articles in the fields of German, Media, Film, and Gender Studies.

Stephan Ehrig, Assistant Professor in German at the University of Glasgow (UK), works on interdisciplinary approaches to diversifying the research on East German cultural production pre- and post-1990, as well as on 19th to 21st century literature, theater and film. His publications include Der dialektische Kleist (2018), the co-edited volumes Entertaining German Culture (2023) and The GDR Today (2018), and journal articles discussing DEFA, GDR theater, reportage literature, and documentary film. His book, Neubau Atmospheres: East German Cultural Remediations of Modernist Architecture, will be published with Berghahn in 2025.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Keynote speaker Bettina Stoetzer, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at MIT and author of Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race and Urban Nature in Berlin (2022, Duke UP), will join us on June 22 to deliver the keynote address. Dr. Stoetzer’s groundbreaking research on the intersecting relationships between humans and the natural world in an urban setting will give weight to the Institute's opening and frame many of the larger questions participants will explore during the week. The keynote will explore questions, such as: How do social inequalities shape the national imaginary in relation to perspectives on urban development, environmental policy and activism, and how do we examine the intersections of space, nature and civilization to narrate, depict and understand some of the most pressing issues of the 20th and 21st centuries?

INSTITUTE DETAILS

The week will alternate between workshops, discussions and film screenings. The daily screenings and discussions pair films with a selection of theoretical readings and contemporary fiction and documentary films. The frameworks we develop apply to a selection of films that move from the the topic of “Aufbau” (“Reconstruction”) in urban spaces to rural spaces, from rural spaces to industries, and from industries back to the cities and nature space. Our objective is not to separate these environments but to read for their intersections and interconnections. 

Questions that we will discuss include:

• What kinds of spaces were created during the phase of “Aufbau” in East Germany? How do films depict modernist architecture and art, and spaces of socialist utopia?

• What are the origins and features of the environmental movement in East Germany and what role did film play in the formation of this movement, formally, politically and socially? What does this history mean for us in German Studies and related fields both today and beyond?

• How do films about urban, rural and industrial spaces depict tensions and intersections of class, age, gender and generation?

• How do these films envision or re-envision the German concept of “Heimat”?

• What can we learn from these films about sustainability, utopias, and life/futures on a damaged planet?

Participants will navigate the material together with the co-facilitators while forming working groups to conduct further research and plan future conference panels and publications on institute topics.

A major feature of the Summer Film Institute is a weeklong public film series that brings participants and members from the public and the Five Colleges together to watch and discuss movies related to the institute topics.

For more information, please contact Magaret Nguru at filmtour@german.umass.edu