As part the current exhibition Waters, this deep (Becoming B – Chapter 5), Künstlerhaus Bethanien presents a film program that engages with water in its many layered meanings, followed by a conversation. Programmed by Nnenna Onuoha, the selection brings together films that approach remembrance through water as both material and metaphor. Rain, rivers, lagoons, vanished islands, and distant beaches become sites where personal memory, collective history, and deep time intersect.
Water carries traces of childhood and migration, of imperial ambition and ecological transformation — even of worlds that no longer exist. Moving between the intimate and the planetary, the films suggest that returning to submerged, vanished, or fleeting pasts can offer ways of reckoning with an unsettled present.
Screening program:
Regen [EN: Rain]
dir. Mannus Franken and Joris Ivens (1929, 14min)
A masterpiece of early avant-garde cinema, Regen unfolds the life of a rain shower in Amsterdam as if it were a verse. Shot over many months and composed as a cinematic poem, the film dissolves city streets into reflections, droplets, umbrellas and canals, turning familiar scenes into shimmering metaphors of flux and pause. Rain here is not just weather but a dreamlike rhythm that reshapes perception and time.
Ayɛwohomumɔ [EN: You Have Made Yourself Wretched]
dir. Nnenna Onuoha (2018, 12min)
Looking out at the European winter rain, a self-described pluviophile remembers tropical storms from her Ghanaian childhood. Interlacing personal reminiscence with Akan seasonal naming traditions, this film becomes a gentle meditation on longing and grounding, where rain evokes both the melancholy of winter and the sensuous memory of far-off skies.
Lampedusa
dir. Philip Cartelli and Mariangela Ciccarello (2015, 14min)
In 1831, a volcanic island briefly rose from the Mediterranean off Sicily only to slip back beneath the waves months later. Through archival imagery, poetic narration, and pointed reflection, Lampedusa animates that lost land as a site of utopian claim, colonial fantasy, and maritime disappearance. The vanished island becomes a haunting emblem for all who traverse seas seeking solid ground and a place to call home.
Fluid Lagos
dir. Justine Chima Unanka, Kamnelechukwu Obasi, Kenneth “Laboomz” Donatus, Lateefah Mayaki, Morola Odufuwa, Nora Mandray, Peace Olatunji “Dopay”, Ramon Shitta, Uwana Anthony “Churchy”, Wami Aluko (2024, 11min)
This vibrant, tripartite portrait charts Lagos not by its skyline but by its waters: the lagoon, the beach, and the bodies that move through them. From a boatman skimming the waterways to the flow of traffic in the street and mobile phone visions of sunlit Tarkwa Bay, Fluid Lagos celebrates the city’s fluid life. Water here is blessing and burden, site of play and perpetual movement.
Ever Since, I Have Been Flying
dir. Aylin Gökmen (2023, 18min)
Vakıf, a 60-year-old Kurdish nomad, conjures the landscapes of his youth — the streams where his mother bathed him as a child, the cotton fields where he first loved, the mountain pastures of his family’s life, and the dark confinements of later violence at the hands of the state police. His recollections drift like mist over both physical and psychological terrain.