HIS MASTER'S VOICE film programme: The Halfmoon Files

Fri 14 June 2013, 20:00
The Halfmoon Files
DE 2007, D: Philip Scheffner, 87 minutes

"Es war einmal ein Mann.
Er geriet in den europäischen Krieg.
Deutschland nahm diesen Mann gefangen.
Er möchte nach Indien zurückkehren.
Wenn Gott gnädig ist, wird er bald Frieden machen.
Dann wird dieser Mann von hier fortgehen."

The words of Mall Singh, spoken into a phonograph on 11 December 1916 in the town of Wünsdorf near Berlin, fade away with a crackling sound.

90 years later, Mall Singh is a number on an old shellac disc in an archive, one of hundreds of voices of colonial soldiers of the First World War.

The recordings were made in a unique alliance between the military, science and the entertainment industry. In his experimental search for clues in "The Halfmoon Files", Philip Scheffner follows these voices to the place where they were recorded. As in a memory game that remains incomplete until the end, he uncovers images and sounds in which the ghosts of the past come to life. The words of his protagonists spiral into one another. Those who pressed the record button on their phonographs, on their photo and film cameras, wrote the official history. Mall Singh and the other prisoners of war from the half-moon camp have disappeared from this history. Their ghosts seem to be playing with the filmmaker, lying in wait for him. They follow him on his way to bring the voices back to their homeland.

But the plot of the story slips away from the narrator. And the ghosts cannot be driven away.

"Wenn ein Mensch stirbt, irrt er herum und wird ein Geist.
Es ist die Seele, die umherschweift.
Diese Seele ist wie ein Lufthauch.
Der Geist ist wie die Luft, die uns umgibt.
Er kann überall hingehen."

Thu 4 July 2013 / Fri 5 July 2013, 8:00 pm
The night of the hunter
- CANCELLED -