As part of the campaign ‘International Solidarity - Stop Austerity!’ we are holding a film seminar as an open-air cinema at the University of Hamburg, where we want to reflect on the international, cultural and historical significance of the break with neoliberalism with films on the topic of austerity vs. solidarity.
At the next screening on Wednesday, 12 June 2024, from 9 pm (ct), we will watch and discuss together the film ‘Innocence’ by Guy Davidi from 2022. We are pleased that the film will be introduced by the director himself and that we will have the opportunity to discuss what we have seen with him.
More about the film:
What does it mean to grow up in a society that has declared war to be the norm? Nobody should really have to ask themselves this question after 1945. As a consequence of fascism and world war, the unconditional commandment of peace, the renunciation of violence in international relations, the duty to regulate conflicts in a civilian manner, the right to refuse military service and the prohibition of "speech and actions likely to disturb the peaceful coexistence of peoples" were enshrined as the highest principles in the international statutes of the United Nations and in the German Basic Law in order to free humanity from the scourge of war. However, as state-commissioned murder is a profitable business for a few, even in this country some incorrigible people never tire of propagating the population's "suitability for war" as if it were a legitimate or even desirable goal. The results of this can be seen for decades in Israel, where the German government is still supplying weapons even though it has long been known that its extreme right-wing government is using them to commit the most serious war crimes against the Palestinian civilian population. But there are also people in Israel who are resolutely opposed to this normalised madness. One of them is the Jaffa-born filmmaker Guy Davidi.
In his latest documentary film "Innocence", he holds up a mirror to a society in which the military has been turned into an identity-forming institution and shows the damage caused by such a perversion of humane standards.
Using personal examples and accounts of experiences, he shows how children and young people are systematically brought up from an early age in the "virtuous" spirit of later service in the armed forces: Painting lessons and war toys in kindergarten, alarm drills and weapons fairs in primary school, war films, memorial acts and military holiday camps in secondary school as well as the obligatory visit to a concentration camp memorial before being called up for basic military service, which lasts a compulsory 24 months for girls and 30 months for boys and includes training with heavy firearms as well as regular war missions in the occupied Palestinian territories. All this is intended to convey the impression that anyone who is not prepared to kill or put their life on the line cannot be an accepted member of society or is even betraying their family, their country, their Jewish roots and the victims of the Holocaust.
It is hardly surprising that suicide is the most common cause of death among Israeli soldiers outside of war under this pressure and is also the most serious condemnation of an army that describes itself as the most "moral" in the world.
Sensitively selected letters, drawings and poems by young people who took their own lives before or during their military service form the film's haunting narrative framework. They are documents of the desperate struggle for humanity in a deeply inhumane system. Through their critical and highly reflective personal expression, they focus like a burning glass on everything that makes a militarised society worth overcoming. In this way, the film narrative becomes a convincing plea that the most urgent task of our time is to finally create peace, i.e. to work emphatically for conditions in which man is a friend to man.
All areas of social life - day-care centres, schools and universities, private companies and public institutions, trade unions, associations, clubs and parties, work, everyday life and leisure - acquire their supra-individual meaningful purpose through personal and collective commitment to a civil, solidary and humane development of the world.
Man realises himself by learning from history to consciously shape it with his peers in accordance with beauty. Life wins when weapons are silenced.
Therefore: Bread, peace, dignity - now! International solidarity: an end to austerity.
"I tell you, I'm fed up with being virtuous because nothing works, renunciate because there's an unnecessary lack, busy as a bee because there's a lack of organisation, brave because my regime involves me in wars. Kalle, man, friend, I have had enough of all virtues and refuse to be a hero."
Bertolt Brecht, "Refugee Conversations", written in exile in the 1940s.
30 сен 2024
