DEFA to Host 11th Summer Film Institute

The DEFA Film Library is welcoming 40 international participants from five continents for its 11th biennial Summer Film Institute, HIDDEN FIGURES: Blackness and Black Experiences in East Germany, at UMass Amherst from June 11-17, 2023.  

Co-directed by Priscilla Layne (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Evan Torner (University of Cincinnati), the weeklong institute mobilizes film theory to explore screen representations of Blackness, as well as lived experiences of BIPoC in former East Germany.  

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Inspired by questions raised at previous Summer Film Institutes and at Black German Heritage and Research Association conferences, the film screenings and collaborative workshops will address (East) German notions of civil rights, equity, inclusion and difference—both under and after the end of state socialism.  

Like prior Summer Film Institutes, the accompanying film festival will be open to the general public and takes place at Amherst Cinema and UMass Amherst. The festival includes 15 feature and documentary films and will open with Frank Beyer’s 1983 feature film “Taken for a Ride,” a commentary on social and racial discrimination.  

The festival program presents rarely shown East German productions, which were digitized for the festival by the DEFA Foundation in Berlin and subtitled for the first time by the DEFA Film Library. A highlight of the program will be the premiere of the newly restored documentary Paul Robeson: “I’m a Negro. I’m an American.” (1989, dir. Kurt Tetzlaff). Short films directed by students of the East German Film Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as new German productions, will complement the East German film selection. 

All films will be introduced by the co-directors, participants of the institute and the DEFA Film Library team. More information about the institute and the festival lineup can be found at mass.edu/defa. 

The Summer Film Institute and public film festival are supported by the German Consulate General Boston, the DEFA Foundation, PROGRESS Film GmhH in Germany and the DEFA Film Library and German & Scandinavian Studies at UMass Amherst.