Filmed every day during the final four weeks of the Berlin Film Museum’s construction.

"Here it is very nice at the Moment" is a triptych. In the first part, "Maria und die Welt", Ute Aurand films Maria Lang in 1995, who moves to the countryside to take care of her mother. The second part, "Familiengruft - ein Liebesgedicht an meine Mutter" was produced by Maria Lang in 1981. It tells about what we most often keep quiet - prohibitions, barriers but also love. Twenty-two years later, Ute Aurand films Maria's daily care of her mother, now ninety-six years old: edited in 2006 by the two filmmakers, "Der Schmetterling im Winter", composes the last element of the triptych.

A filmic encounter with Brazil, which Aurand visited for the first time in September 2022 for screenings of her films and Margaret Tait’s in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Aurand’s 16mm films are portraits of people and place, often prompted by the discovery and experience of travel. As George Clark has written, the journey is a cornerstone of Aurand’s filmmaking: "“Her work builds out from fragments, detours, refrains and returns; her camera picks up discarded gestures and suspends them in time. Films are always moving, always fleeting, Aurand’s work reminds us. These qualities are as fundamental to lived experience as they are to the cinema. Throughout Ute Aurand’s work we encounter a world animated by her mobile and dynamic camera, following, chasing, leading and dissecting space."

One day in Neubrandenburg, filmed in a small city 130km north of Berlin in September 1995.

Young Pines grew out of three trips to Japan between May 2009 and November 2010. Invited to Japan for a series of film screenings, I began filming in Yokohama, Tokyo, and Kanazawa. Even in the big cities, I experienced how strongly the Japanese feel connected to nature and how they tend to see no contradiction between culture and nature. I found this stimulating and in harmony with some of my own impulses. I wanted to return and film more in other seasons. In Spring 2010 I visited Kamakura, Kyoto, and Nara, in November I went Northeast and filmed in Matsushima, Tono, Miyako in Atsumi, Yamadera, and Nikko. All of my film images have been filmed before the disaster of the Tsunami and Fukushima, but the final editing was done in the following months.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

Maria Lang is my very close filmmaker friend who lives in the southern german countryside. We see her gardening and visiting an exhibition of female impressionist painters.

A short portrait of the filmmaker Renate Sami.

Filmed in Switzerland and released as part of a triptych with A Walk, Zuoz features the filmmaker Robert Beavers skating on ice. Beavers represents another “new beginning” in Aurand’s practice. She recalls seeing his work in the late ‘90s and “enter[ing] a space beyond the images where one is entirely within oneself and simultaneously in the world … where one is simply present and receives the full gift of the film.”

Throughout her work, Aurand frequently makes her camera and her images felt as an active, moving body—spinning, rushing, departing, returning, expanding, contracting, hanging upside down. In A Walk, her film goes walking. The camera occupies a snowy Swiss setting, as Aurand creates a material, tonal landscape that is both nebulous, serene, and wonderfully energetic.