Incommunicado

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