DEFA Film Library Well Represented at 48th German Studies Association Conference
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The DEFA Film Library was well represented at the 48th German Studies Association (GSA) conference in Atlanta, GA, from Sept. 26-29, 2024.
“It was a very rewarding conference for us," says Mariana Ivanova, academic director for the DEFA Film Library. "We co-sponsored four panels and two roundtables with many young US and international researchers who discussed film productions from our archive while applying new approaches and perspectives. We also celebrated the publication of two new DEFA-related books: DOCUMENTING SOCIALISM (edited by Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke) and SCIENCE ON SCREEN AND PAPER (edited by Mariana Ivanova and Juliane Scholz), both published by the prestigious international publisher Berghahn Books. Furthermore, we announced the winner of our 2024 Graduate Student Essay Prize: Cynthia Shin (Indiana Univ. Bloomington) received the prize for the article-length essay, 'Socialist Women amidst the Stars – A Feminist Reading of DEFA’s Space Adventure Trilogy.'"
The DEFA Film Library also co-organized the GSA Arts Night and presented the autobiographical documentary Locked-Up Time (Germany, 1990, dir. Sibylle Schönemann) as a pre-conference free stream—about the director’s experiences as a former East German political prisoner who meets with people responsible for her arrest and imprisonment a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The streaming event was followed by the in-person premiere of a filmed interview with Schönemann, which DEFA exclusively produced for the Arts Night and Schönemann’s virtual campus visits at various universities this fall.
The DEFA Film Library will screen Locked-Up Time and discuss the film on the UMass Amherst campus on Thursday, Nov. 7, in Isenberg SOM 137 at 6:30 p.m.