Sebastian Brameshuber

In a remote, abandoned industrial site near a centuries-old ore mine in the Austrian Alps, a self-taught mechanic runs a business exporting used cars to his native Nigeria. As he pursues his lonely day-to-day activities with wondrous serenity, past, present and future begin to overlap, and memories of a lost friendship resurface against the backdrop of a mysterious promise of everlasting resources. 

Andi plays the electric guitar and is mad about guns. Michi hopes his Doc Martens show the right political stance. Ramona is looking for an apprenticeship and has her heart set on a lip piercing. These three 15-year-olds live in Ebensee, a village in Austria where in 2009 the annual memorial ceremony at the former concentration camp was disrupted by a group of youths with air rifles. Michi’s computer contains both a traditional folk song about his home village and a heavy punk track. As we see him impersonating Michael Jackson, taking part in a procession in lederhosen and felt hat and brandishing a rattle, or joking about a piece of anti-Nazi graffiti, a trenchant image takes shape of how complicated self-discovery and personality formation can be for adolescents; the distance between the most divergent models for identity is remarkably small. Combining beautifully shot moments from the teenagers’s day-to-day lives over the course of a year and statements from them and their parents about the treatment of the Nazi period, the film also outlines what sensitivities the official culture of remembrance is met with. And not just in Ebensee. (Birgit Kohler, Berlinale Forum)

Of Stains, Scrap & Tires is a calm, documentary miniature that chooses the auto export business of three young Nigerians in the Erzberg region as a point of association and departure for formulating something more fundamental about the first and third worlds, movement and standstill, business, space, and freedom. 

From 2944 mosques Istanbul’s muezzins call the people to prayer five times a day. Once a year, the best among them is determined in a nationwide contest. The film follows the course of the competition along a handful of participants. One repeatedly hears the variations and interpretations of a chant, reminder of the duty of prayer. A tradition becomes visible in which religious and competitive spirit and the search for a voice are worked through performatively year after year as a vanity fair in an exclusively male universe.