In Retrospect

Our work on in retrospect began with a commission from the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism. We were asked to develop and produce a video installation on the subject of right-wing and racist attacks in Munich from 1945 to the present day. During this process, we also dealt with the attack on the Olympia shopping mall in 2016 and its political motives. Besides that we began to collect photographic and video archive material from the 1970s about the site’s origins. During this creative process, we curated a film series for the Munich International Film Festival on Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Saless. For us, the condition of the films was symptomatic of the way the legacy of a migrant director was dealt with in Germany. How could it happen that the films of an internationally acclaimed director were only accessible to the public in such poor quality? By viewing the films under these circumstances, we also developed a kind of distance and a new relationship towards the copies of Saless’ films and their rough aesthetic. We began to see these feature films as documents of an Iranian director’s reaction to the increasing racism in West Germany in the 1980s.

— Mila Zhluktenko, Daniel Asadi Faezi