FREMD GEHEN : GESPRÄCHE MIT MEINER FREUNDIN
Presented by Louise Burkart, member of the digitisation and restoration team of the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum
“Stepping Out: Conversations With My Friend” is a film about love and power relationships: between women and men, Germans and US-Americans, in the civilian and military worlds. From the end of the Second World War until the withdrawal of the troops in 1995, these worlds were able to meet in one place. Annette Brauerhoch, protagonist and co-scriptwriter, documents her relationships and intimate experiences with African American soldiers with the help of her Super 8 camera while the director creates a spatial and thematic distance to the events with a second camera. Within the two narrative perspectives, discourses on female lust, on the desire for a foreign body and on the closed cosmos of the military world intersect.
The restorer – DEUTSCHES FILMINSTITUT & FILMMUSEUM
The DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut und Filmmuseum is one of the leading cinematheques in Germany and, together with the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, forms the network of German Cinematheques. Since 2013, the DFF has digitised over 300 films to date thanks to funding from the State of Hesse and the Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media, and since 2019 with funding from the national film heritage program. The focus is on silent film and early sound film, avant-garde and experimental films, post-war German cinema and New German Cinema. The analogue and digital prints are regularly screened in Europe at international heritage festivals, but also at non-specialist festivals.
Photo credit: © DFF / Eva Heldmann
Eva C. Heldmann is an experimental and documentary filmmaker. In her first 16mm films, Heldmann deals with female sexuality. “Stepping Out – Conversations With My Friend” is her first long documentary film, shot in Super8, 16mm and Super16mm formats. She now works with a digital camera. Heldmann co-founded the cinema Mondpalast [Moon Palace] in 1979. She has published various articles in the first German feminist film magazine “Frauen und Film” [Women and Film] and has had various film screenings, including at the Berlinale Forum Expanded and Panorama; at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; at the Viennale and at the European Media Art Festival Osnabrück. She lives and works in Berlin.
Eva Heldmann Filmproduktion
DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum
Louise Burkart - burkart@dff.film
End of digitisation and color grading, begining of sound and image restoration
July 2022