Matthias Wermke, Lutz Henke, Mischa Leinkauf
Germany
2015 | 0:15:00

Poetry or threat? An act of surrender or perhaps art? These were the theories that New York puzzled over last summer. How can one incident be interpreted in so many ways? By means of press reports, Symbolic Threats allows the public at large to express their extreme disparity of interpretation. Inspired by the heated debate over the two „White American Flags“ that suddenly appeared on the towers of New York City’s iconic Brooklyn Bridge, the film asks what kind of societal scope art has in the present day. What happens when threatened freedom reinstates art with the element of danger? Who or what makes it into a threat? Are we safe in the city? What is next?

Luis Sens
Argentina
2015 | 0:09:20

Two bourgeoise women comment a stranger.

Michka Saäl
Canada
2015 / 1:05:00


In 1978, Spoon Jackson was sentenced to life imprisonment. In jail, where he still lives, he discovered poetry and his own literary talent. Michka Saäl knows Spoon. She never sees him but she talks to him on the phone. She listens to him reading his poems. She fi lms landscapes which are his own kind of freedom, or his dreamed escape. She fi lms bodies that dance and wonder if it is possible to translate words into movements, if it is possible to give Spoon some freedom of movement, even vicariously.