North American Premiere
In 2018, police unlawfully evicted treehouse-dwelling environmental activists protesting deforestation in Hambach Forest. Embedded among the activists was film student and journalist Steffen Meyn, who had been documenting the resistance movement for two years. He tragically fell to his death during the police raid. Three of his friends and fellow students compiled the footage he shot over two years to create a documentary chronicling the overlap of the personal and political. Lonely Oaks blends immersive, observational documentary at its finest (Meyn’s footage was filmed with a head-mounted 360° camera), with a meta-commentary of interviews with activists from Hambach Forest. It explores a wide range of perspectives, often contradictory, as it refuses to fall into reductive binaries or sloganeering, instead offering a remarkably nuanced approach to knotty, complex political issues, questioning and probing the effectiveness and necessity of direct activism, anarchism, democracy, violence, ultimately asking whether a cause is ever worth dying for. A powerful, provocative documentary that forces you to reckon with your own personal and political commitments.
Community Partner
Germany
2023
In English and German with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Thursday October 05
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Producer
Melanie Andernach, Knot Losen
Screenwriter
Fabiana Fragale, Kilian Kuhlendahl, Jens Mühlhoff
Cinematography
Carina Neubohn, Steffen Meyn
Editor
Ulf Albert
Original Music
Antonia de Luca, Caroline Kox
Directors
Fabiana Fragale
Italian-Swiss filmmaker Fabiana Fragale was born in Zurich in 1994. She has been a resident of Cologne since 2015 and is a student at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Her documentary and fictional works deal mostly with anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist themes. In 2018 she founded the art collective Polsprung.
Kilian Kuhlendahl
Kilian Kuhlendahl graduated from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in 2017 and has since worked in various narrative formats as director and author such as film, audio book and graphic novel. As a member of the Polsprung collective, Kilian creates multi-perspectival spatial installations and performances.
Jens Mühlhoff
Jens Mühlhoff was born 1991 in Wuppertal, and studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 2011 – 2018. His works as an artist often investigates and deal with public and semi-public space and thus explore the everyday realization of politics. For several years he has worked as a director and writer on various film productions and as artistic director for independent art projects.
Spectrum
See more films in this series:
The Mother of All Lies
As her parents and grandmother prepare to leave the Casablanca home they have lived in for decades, Asmae El Moudir takes the opportunity to probe the past, unraveling repressed truths buried within her own family and Moroccan political history.
Orlando, My Political Biography
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the transgressive novel is used as a framework to investigate the very real contemporary struggles of trans and non-binary people. Winner of the Teddy Award and Encounters Jury Prize at Berlin Film Festival.
Between Revolutions
In a hybrid film comprised entirely of archival footage, two fictional women are torn from each other by the tides of repressive political and patriarchal systems. A haunting, lyrical tale of longing for freedom amongst connection.
Mighty Afrin: In the Time of Floods
From the floodplains of Brahmaputra River to Bangladesh’s capital city, this stunning hybrid-documentary captures the catastrophic effects of climate change upon the country’s people and landscape. Told through an orphan's personal odyssey.
The Tuba Thieves
Drawing on her experience as a d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing person, director Alison O’Daniel transcends assumptions of sound, silence, and language in this groundbreaking hybrid doc framed around a string of unsolved tuba thefts in L.A.
Hello Dankness
In the finest tradition of MAD Magazine, found footage from classic US film and television is combined to create a fictitious American neighborhood, reflecting modern American life from 2016 - 2021 in a wildly unconventional and absurdist satire.
Asog
Jaya, a teacher and comedian, travels across the typhoon-ravaged Philippines in a bid to win a beauty pageant. En route, they pick up an unlikely companion. Comic, sorrowful, and political, Asog examines the climate crisis through a kaleidoscopic lens.
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
Within the confines of a smoke sauna deep in an Estonian forest, groups of women gather to cleanse themselves in both body and soul, sharing in traditional sauna-based rituals, while also revealing their hurts and longings, joys and pains.
Kim's Video
New York institution Kim’s Video closed its doors in 2008. Fifteen years later, filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin set out to find out what happened to the 55,000 film collection and uncover a story of corruption, deception, and intrigue.