In the autumn 2020 Marit Östberg started to interview people that have helped her to become a filmmaker. The result is a podcast that preserves queer knowlege that so easily gets lost in education. 
First in line is the artist Liz Rosenfeld. Marit and Liz started to collaborate 10 years ago with the film When We Are Together We Can Be Everywhere - a Berlin cruising film about sex, intimacy and friendship in which the relationship between the director Marit and actor Liz is thematized. 
In this episode of Film School they talk about the importance of sharing feelings and being able to dismantle oneself. What does it mean to be working queerly and why does filmmaking remind them of BDSM?

Liz Rosenfeld (USA/DE) is a Berlin based artist who works in film/video, performance, and personal experimental writing practice. Liz explores the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, and both past and future histories related to the ways in which memory is queered. Liz's work approaches flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focusing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, approaching questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space. Departing from the personal, Liz's work is rooted in questions that contend with how queer ontologies are rooted in both political and personal variant hypocritical desire(s). Liz is one of the members of Berlin based film collective nowMomentnow. Liz’s films are represented by Video Data Bank and LUX Moving Image.

Film School theme music made by Heidi Mortenson. linktr.ee/nosnetrom

Episode 1: Liz Rosenfeld

When Marit Östberg met Jasco Viefhues in 2010, she had recently started to make DIY-films, knowing little about conventional rules. Jasco was a film director, studying inside of a traditional film institution. During the years they were partners, Jasco shared his knowledge and supported Marit in her process to become a filmmaker. In episode 2 of Film School, Jasco talks about his experience of being a filmmaker and theatre director in Germany. We get to know about racism within the film industry and about the process to heal as a black, queer man. We also get a glimpse into how collective memory and the idea of the body as an archive can be used as working methods within film and theater.

Jasco Viefhues is a filmmaker and dramaturge. He's been studying Film Directing at DFFB, The Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin. Since 2017 he's been working as a dramaturge, video artist and work shop facilitator at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Berlin, and made his debut as theatre director in 2020 with his play Complex of tensions, in which he researches black masculinity. His latest film Rescue the Fire (Rettet das Feuer) has been acclaimed for the poetic portrait of the German photographer Jürgen Baldiga and the AIDS crisis in the early 90th in Berlin. Except for his ongoing collaboration with Ballhaus Naunynstraße, his current art work is focused on experimental memory work and collaboration within the African diaspora.

Film School is a series of conversations in which Marit Östberg talks to people who supported, performed and worked in her films. The queer communities she's been collaborating with have been her film school and through this podcast she wants to collect precious knowledges that comes from queer lives and bodies. For more information: https://maritostberg.com
Film School theme music made by Heidi Mortenson. linktr.ee/nosnetrom

Episode 2: Jasco Viefhues

In the 3rd episode of Film School Marit Östberg talks with the Swedish filmmaker Maja Borg, known for their powerful and experimental documentaries. In Future My Love (2012) Maja investigates the capitalist system to try to understand why we choose to live in a system that leads to destruction. 
 
Marit and Maja collaborated when Maja made their second feature documentary, Passion (2021), a film that explores BDSM and Christianity. Through experimental images and interviews from BDSM-communities and the church, Maja shows how these two seemingly different contexts are bound together. 
Maja’s documentary team filmed Marit’s cast and crew when she directed her short film Hold. Interviews and images from Marit’s film community in Berlin are a part of the film Passion.  
 
In this episode they talk about how to support each other to be able to continue making queer films. They discuss the risk of exploitation, when filmmakers use other communities’ cultural capital to portrait them in their documentaries. They also talk about how complicated it can be for queer filmmakers to be received by straight audiences.    

This conversation was recorded in the spring of 2022. 

Film School theme music made by Heidi Mortenson. linktr.ee/nosnetrom

Episode 3: Maja Borg

Film School is a series of conversations in which Marit Östberg talks to people who supported, performed and worked in her films. The queer communities she's been collaborating with have been her film school, the learnings through queer relationships and networks have been her alternative university. In Film School, Marit collects precious knowledge that comes from queer lives and bodies.
Marit Östberg is a filmmaker, producer, visual artist and journalist from Sweden.
For more info: www.maritostberg.com
Film School theme music made by Heidi Mortenson. https://linktr.ee/nosnetrom
Photo of Marit Östberg by Toni Karat.

Film School

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