Image

The DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst will host the 12^th biennial Summer Film Institute, as well as a public film festival, starting June 22. This year’s institute, “Screened Environments: Intersections of Built, Natural and Social Spaces in East Germany,” will welcome 40 national and international scholars, researchers and film curators to the UMass campus June 22-28. Together, they will explore cinematic depictions of urban, rural and industrial spaces to examine how East German films addressed questions of social and environmental justice at moments of crisis or impasse, and to draw connections to contemporary moments and imagining a more socially and environmentally just future.

The weeklong Institute will be co-directed by Maria Stehle, of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Stephan Ehrig, from the University of Glasgow, U.K. A keynote lecture by M.I.T.’s Bettina Stoetzer, titled “Ruderal City: Seeding Livable Worlds for the Future,” will open the Institute on June 22 and will provide a conceptual foundation based in the environmental humanities and studies of the Anthropocene that interlinks the built and the natural worlds.

“We are very gratified that so many participants will join our 2025 Institute and that we found an experienced, well-established group of professionals who will participate,” says Victoria Rizo Lenshyn, associate director of the DEFA Film Library. “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 will be free and open to everyone. The festival will present 14 fiction and documentary films; most are North American premieres and have been subtitled for the first time by the DEFA Film Library team. The film selection, which reflects on the Summer Film Institute’s key topics, will take place at UMass, Smith College and Amherst Cinema. 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 who lives in a rural place and longs for city life, presented by leading actor and scriptwriter Tucké Royale.

The complete program for the public film festival can be found at www.umass.edu/defa.

The Summer Film Institute and the public film festival are supported by the German Consulate General in Boston, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation-NYC, DEFA Foundation Berlin, PROGRESS Film GmbH, the Department of German Studies at Amherst College, German Studies at Smith College and the Five College Consortium. It is also supported by the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s College Humanity and Fine Arts, Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, Film Studies department, Stonewall Center, Renaissance of the Earth Project at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, the German & Scandinavian Program, Department of Environmental Conservation, Isenberg School of Management and DEFA Film Library.