In both her fiction and documentary films Helma Sanders-Brahms

(1940-2014) consistently explored political and social issues from a

female and feminist point of view. Characteristic for her works is how

she artistically approached topics like the student protest of the late

1960s, feminism, women’s lib, immigrant workers and the legacy of

Germany’s Nazi history. Tonight we screen her first feature film

Under the Pavement Lies the Strand (1975), a film dealing with legal

reforms like the abortion bill and the atmosphere and aftermath

of the student movement in West-Germany.

Harun Farocki (1944-2014). Mr. Farocki made more than 100 films, many of them short experimental documentaries that explored contemporary life, and what he saw as its devastations — war, imprisonment, surveillance, capitalism — through the visual stimuli that attend them. Ruminative, but with an undercurrent of urgency born of his longstanding social engagement, Mr. Farocki’s films sought to illuminate the ways that the technology of image-making is used to shape public ideology. Tonight we screen two of Farocki’s masterful late essay works: War at a Distance (2003) and Workers Leaving the Factory (1995).