Screened Environments: DEFA Film Library Hosts Summer Film Institute and Public Festival
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The DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst will host the 12th biennial Summer Film Institute, Screened Environments: Intersections of Built, Natural and Social Spaces in East Germany, from June 22 to 28, 2025. This year’s institute, held on the UMass campus, will welcome 40 national and international scholars, researchers, and film curators. Participants will explore cinematic depictions of urban, rural, and industrial spaces in East German film to examine how these works address questions of social and environmental justice at moments of crisis or impasse, and to draw connections to contemporary moments.
The weeklong institute will be co-directed by Maria Stehle (University of Tennessee Knoxville) and Stephan Ehrig (University of Glasgow, UK). A keynote lecture titled “Ruderal City: Seeding Livable Worlds for the Future” by Bettina Stoetzer (MIT, Cambridge) will open the institute on June 22, providing a conceptual foundation based in the environmental humanities and studies of the Anthropocene that interlinks the built and natural worlds.
“We are very gratified that so many participants will join our 2025 institute,” said Victoria Rizo Lenshyn, associate director of the DEFA Film Library, “and that we found an experienced, well-established group of professionals who will participate. We hope that the workshop discussions will also draw connections to contemporary moments of environmental urgency, and the role of media and the arts during such crises. And we look forward to seeing how these discussions will carry over to the conversations with the public in our film festival.”
The institute will be accompanied by a public film festival (June 22–27) that is free, in-person, and open to all. Fourteen fiction and documentary films will be presented, most of them North American premieres newly subtitled by the DEFA Film Library team. Screenings will take place at Amherst Cinema, UMass Amherst, and Smith College. A highlight of the festival will be the free community screening of Neubau (Germany, 2020, dir. Johannes M. Schmit), a story about a trans person living in a rural place and longing for city life, presented by leading actor and scriptwriter Tucké Royale.
The Summer Film Institute and public film festival are supported by the German Consulate General in Boston; the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation–NYC; the DEFA Foundation Berlin; PROGRESS Film GmbH; the Department of German Studies at Amherst College; German Studies at Smith College; and the Five College Consortium.
At UMass Amherst, support comes from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts; Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures; Film Studies; the Stonewall Center; The Renaissance of the Earth Project at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies; the German and Scandinavian Program; Department of Environmental Conservation; the Isenberg School of Management; and the DEFA Film Library.
For more information and a full schedule of events, visit umass.edu/defa.
Header image is a still from "Wer hat dich du," courtesy of DEFA.