Universität der Künste Berlin & Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in cooperation with the Institut français Berlin: Film screening with two short films followed by a talk.

My Grandmother is a Skydiver (Animated short film, 13 min)
Director: Polina Piddubna
Alfyia, a joyful young woman in 1960s Central Asia, is actively parachuting and studying to become a midwife, when she receives an extraordinary phone call from her granddaughter in 2022. She is worried about her grandmother's safety amid the invasion of Ukraine. In this intergenerational conversation across time and space, the granddaughter tries to restore and rethink family memory and her own ethnic identity, break the endless cycle of collective trauma and reflect on the meaning of human life. 

The Non-Monument (Short film, 13 min)
Director: Yara Saleh
The film, “The Non-Monument,” interrogates the paradox of memorializing unresolved trauma within Syria’s ongoing conflict, critically examining how state-sanctioned monuments can act as instruments of historiographical erasure, codifying victor narratives while effacing vernacular memory. The work confronts the aporia of postwar commemoration, asking how one can archive events that resist temporal closure, and critiques the imposition of linear “monumental time” upon conditions of persistent violence.