Wankostättn

As oral history, film can record witness testimony, enabling the archiving, replication, and dissemination of spoken words. The principle of testimony, however, is inscribed far more deeply in film as a medium: the concrete moment when a person speaks is recorded – how they speak, the gestures and pitch accompanying their words, where they speak and how they involve the location.
 
Karin Berger's films about the Stojka family use all the options available in film, and this is what makes them so valuable. As Lovari (a group of Sintis and Romani), the family was persecuted under National Socialism. In his childhood, Karl Stojka survived the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. An interview Karin Berger did with him in 1997 has now been released under the title Wankostättn. In the film, Stojka walks down a street in Vienna's 10th district talking about the trailer park that was located there in the 1930s. The camera makes it clear that this location vanished long ago. Vanished violently, just like many of Stojka's relatives and friends, who were murdered in death marches, for instance, that Stojka experienced as well. "... a particular past that exists, today, not only in me, but in the survivors, the eyewitnesses from back then," as he puts it. This is a film concerned with preserving this story beyond Karl Stojka's death in 2003. (S.H.)

The screening (37 min) will be followed by a discussion with director Karin Berger.