Kamen + Guided Tour

Introduction by René Frölke

Florence Lazar’s Kamen – The Stones illustrates an ongoing political injustice: an attempt by the Bosnian Serb Republic to erase the traces of the savage ethnic violence that decimated the region two decades ago. René Frölke’s Guided Tour sardonically chronicles then–German President Horst Köhler’s 2008 visit to the HfG Karlsruhe, the renowned university of fine arts.

Kamen – The Stones / Kamen – Les Pierres
Florence Lazar, France, 2014, DCP, 65m
Serbian, Russian, and Bosnian with English subtitles
“What is happening today,” a middle-aged woman tells the camera an hour into Florence Lazar’s patient, devastating exposé of the contemporary Bosnian Serb Republic, “is only a continuation of what happened during the war.” The country’s slow, methodical resculpting of its landscape—its construction of faux-aged churches, its replacement of old buildings with others of a more Orthodox architecture—is an extension by other means of the savage program of ethnic cleansing the region’s Bosniak population suffered at the hands of Serbian forces. Its essential testimonies and careful factual surveys aside, Kamen – The Stones is a lesson in the use of a single, indelible image—the removal and replacement of stones—to illustrate an ongoing, profoundly disturbing political injustice. U.S. Premiere

Guided Tour / Führung
René Frölke, Germany, 2011, HDCAM, 37m
German with English subtitles
In high-contrast, richly textured black and white (self-consciously recalling cinema verité), René Frölke’s inquisitive camera chronicles then–German President Horst Köhler’s 2008 visit to the HfG Karlsruhe, the renowned university of fine arts. In this portrait of embedded power amid economic crisis, the President gets a guided tour from the university’s most eminent professors, is introduced to a number of the school’s students and takes in their works-in-progress, and candidly discusses the intersection of economics and aesthetics along the way. North American Premiere