Sven Ilgner, Gabriele Voss and Marcus Seibert in the film forum
Frank Brenner
12 October 2024
“Anna Zeit Land” in the Filmforum – Foyer 10/24
Friday, October 11th: For 24 years now, the awarding of the editing awards has been an integral part of the festival calendar in North Rhine-Westphalia. Under the name “Edimotion – 24th Festival for Film Editing and Montage Art”, editors from dozens of countries have come together for creative exchange on the four festival days in Cologne in 2024. In addition to the focus on “Historical Editing”, the country focus on Australia, the International Film Editors Forum (IFEF) and other workshop discussions, this year the focus will once again be on the five nominated films in the feature film, documentary and funding editing categories, which will be followed by Film discussions are all shown on the big screen. Another tradition is the awarding of the honorary editing award, which this year goes to the editor, author and director Gabriele Voss, who is particularly known for her documentary collaborations with Christoph Hübner. On the stage on the opening evening, the long-time artistic director of Edimotion, Kyra Scheurer, together with her colleague Dietmar Kraus, who is responsible for the feature film section and the international program, presented a new employee, Tama Tobias-Macht, who took over organizational management at Edimotion for the first time in 2024 . Scheurer emphasized that Edimotion is still the first and so far only climate-neutral film festival in North Rhine-Westphalia. Thanks to a cooperation with doxs! And thanks to funding from the Imhoff Foundation, a heartfelt wish came true this year, Scheurer continued. For the first time, another festival jury was put together, consisting of young people between the ages of 15 and 19, who also select and award their winners from the competition entries for feature films and documentaries.
Dietmar Kraus, Kyra Scheurer and Tama Tobias-Macht from Edimotion, photo: Frank Brenner
Fascination of the unabridged moment
As in previous years, a film edited by the honorary editing award winner was shown on the opening evening in 2024. Before the projection, the screenwriter and writer Marcus Seibert gave a eulogy for Gabriele Voss. He explained that she first worked with Christoph Hübner in 1971 and that they have made more than 50 films together since then. For Seibert, what is special about Gabriele Voss’ work is the “art of not cutting away”. She is fascinated by the unabridged moment. “You can’t escape life in front of the camera,” the laudator continued. Sound editing would also have its own level of meaning for Voss. “With her, things are told through noises that are not necessarily visible in the picture,” analyzed Marcus Seibert. For them, Voss and Hübner are among the most important chroniclers of the Ruhr area of the last 50 years, as they chronicle the history and change in an industrial region with their documentaries about Prosper/Ebel (most recently in 2023 with “From the End of an Age”) or the “Ruhr Chronicle”. have made visible. The projection was followed by “Anna Zeit Land,” a rather atypical film by the creative duo that premiered at the Forum at the Berlinale in 1994. In contrast to other films by Voss and Hübner, there are not only documentary sequences but also staged fiction, which leads to a hybrid form that the two have not implemented before or since. During the film discussion, Voss recalled a message from the audience after the premiere, in which it was said that “you don’t have to talk so much about the film, it speaks for itself.”
Laudator Marcus Seibert, photo: Frank Brenner
Problems with analog video editing
Nevertheless, an interesting conversation took place at Edimotion between Sven Ilgner, the curator of the Honorary Prize and Homage section, and Honorary Prize winner Gabriele Voss. She revealed that “Anna Zeit Land”, which was created in the upheaval of the German reunification, also marked a change for her as a filmmaker. Not only because of the attempt to use a different film genre, but also because parts of the film were shot on 16mm, while others were shot on video. That would have made editing very difficult in the end. “I suffered a lot,” said Gabriele Voss. With the analog video editing that was used, she would never have really warmed up to it. “It disrupted my creative flow. If analog video editing had become established, I would have stopped editing,” the editor continued. For Voss, today’s digital editing is much closer to classic film editing, although of course it offers much better options and you can work much faster and more comfortably. The focus of “Anna Zeit Land” is a fictional character who is played by two different actresses. “It shouldn’t be a specific person being told here, but rather a figure or a model that is so passive that the real people in the documentary scenes around it become stronger,” explained Gabriele Voss. The openness of the film invites the audience to bring in their personal backgrounds and thereby particularly remember different elements of the film, the editor added. “You look at what is happening here from the perspective of the two Anna characters, otherwise it would be a hodgepodge and chaos. “This narrative function is not necessary in our pure documentaries,” said Voss, summarizing the special structure of “Anna Zeit Land”. On the day of the award ceremony, Monday, October 14th, “From the End of an Age” will be shown in the Filmhauskino at 10:30 a.m., after which there will also be another film discussion with the honorary award winner, Edit.
Honorary award winner for editing Gabriele Voss, photo: Frank Brenner
Frank Brenner
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