Lo-band U‑matic video, 26 minutes (English/German)
Incorporating Super 8 film material
Made during an ERASMUS award semester residency at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Cologne University.
A DVD with German subtitles, edited by Rainer Nelissen, was produced 2009, German translation, Tanya Ury & Amin Farzanefar.
Price DVD 50 Euros
Trailer 3 minutes
Superficially, the documentary-style narrative describes the alienated relationships of three Jewish sisters. The youngest, in search of her past, travels to Germany where the camera finds her doppelgänger and an alternative life. The notion that subjective and personal histories cannot reconcile themselves with a recorded and social history infects the fiction, which never quite achieves an integrated form.
Information
Script & direction: Tanya Ury
Film extract: from “Shoah“ by Claude Lanzman (F, 1985)
Quotation: Last verse of “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue), Paul Celan 1948
Quotations from the “Sepher Toldoth Jeshu” (The Jewish Life of Christ) (London: Progressive Publishing Company, 1885), ed. by G. W. Foote and J. M. Wheeler (HTML at Freethought Archives)
Quotations from: What History is and Why it is Important – Humanities Foundation Course Unit 5, The Open University 1975, The Open University Press.
Sound bite: Vatican Radio 1989
Music: Introit from Fauré Requiem
“Nubbelverbrennung” (an effigy representing winter is burned) filmed after Karneval in Cologne 1989
Camera: Gesa Marten, Karen Knoch, Michael Twinem, Tanya Ury
Edit: Gesa Marten, Karen Knoch, Tanya Ury
Actors: Jane Bone, Tamsin Bone, Lauren Bone, Hannah Bone, Ben Hillwood-Harris, Sam Howard-Williams, Sharon Kivland, Gesa Marten, Henni Nussbaum, Michael Twinem
Trailer 3 minutes
Presentation
1991 – 92 (solo) Sheffield Hallam University Residency screenings (GB)
1990 Feminale Film Festival, Cologne (D)
1990 Jewish Students Arts Festival, London (GB)
1989 Ave, Arnhem, Holland
1989 Reading University Gallery (group)
1989 (solo) Institute for Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Cologne (D)
2009 (11.9) Tanya Ury, solo event “Bitter-Sweet”, early video works, 8 pm, Bühne der Kulturen (Stages of Diversity), Cologne (D)