Cold war places in Berlin: A documentary

In this video, Tom Littlewood takes us on a journey to places where the Cold War past of Berlin is still visible. So they go to Teufelsberg, an artificial hill where the NSA built a listening station in the 60ies to spy on the communist part of Berlin, consisting of strange big white balls on top of the hill. They takl with a former army commander and visit the bunker at airport Tempelhof where thousands of meters of war film burnt right after world war II. Great piece of work, entertaining and educating, I like.

A very nice branding combination as well: VBS teamed up with Palladium boots to produce this documentary. Taking the history of these french military boot brand into account, documentaries from interesting and forgotten places seem to represent Palladium pretty well.

“Captured” – documenting Clayton Patterson’s work

On saturday I had the chance to see the European premier of “Captured” at Babylon Berlin, as part of the American independent film fest “Unknown Pleasures“.

“Captured” is a film about the New York artist Clayton Patterson and a film about the change in the Lower East side, Manhattan, during the last 20 years. Patterson has tons of foto and video material from the time when the Lower East side was a dirty, cheap, chaotic, independent, arty, druggy, anarchic area. Not only with Giuliani this changed into yet another hip and expensive place to live in New York nowadays. “Captured” shows this change and the protagonists around Patterson, e.g. the art scene, the hardcore scene (with Bad Brains e.g.), the queer scene, the squatters.

Filmmakers Den Levin, Ben Solomon and Jenner Furst managed to boil down Pattersons’ hours of film into a consistent, exciting and interesting 90min movie, which literally makes you feel sad you hadn’t been there when it was still rough.

Captured Homepage
Captured MySpace

Best of Evolution2

The Evolution2 is the sequel of the first, very susccesful talent competition Evolution by Hobnox. The contest is coming closer to the final decisions, though it is still time to submit projects to enter the finals.

While the Evo2 is running hot right now, the winners of the first contest are presenting the results of their work since winning the contest at the big Hobnox launch party and evolution festival in february 08. Missy Magazine, a mag about pop, politics and style from a feministic viewpoint is now available as a good old glossy print mag, while Boombaker, a very energetic live drum’n’bass/breakbeat band are on tour right now.

Here, I’d like to present some of the most interesting pieces and explain the rules in a nutshell. Continue reading

Berlin Calling premiere party

The Berlin Calling premiere at Kulturbrauerei rocked. It was packed, people laughed and clapped a lot and the following party at Maria am Ufer took the people on a trip into the world of the movie. Sascha Funke played, Paul Kalkbrenner presented a live set with songs from the movie which are the kind of techno music I love so much: Powerful, massive, yet very longing and soulful. Go watch the movie, now! And here are som impressions from the premiere and the party.

Pablo Francisco: Movie previews

This is an old clip but I had to think about this extremely funny comedian, Pablo Francisco, when we talked about the strange voices one can hear in movie previews today. Pablo has a great parody about this exact phenomenon but he has much more funny types to offer: the Mexican girlfriend, the Chippendale dancer who shaves his huevos.. But here we go for the trailers:

Watch out for more Melt! coverage tomorrow and the kickstart into a late open air rave party season in Berlin!

Berlin Calling Trailer

Berlin Calling is a film by Hannes Stöhr (e.g. director of “Berlin is in Germany“, “One day in Europe“) featuring Paul Kalkbrenner and many other musicians from the network of Berlin techno label Bpitch Control.

Sunday (yesterday), the trailer celebrated its world premiere on Myspace -already, almost 10 000 watched the very emotional ride between party, excess, despair and paranoia. In the movie, Kalkbrenner stars DJ Ickarus who travels the world djing and is about to release his second album – like the Ikarus from Greek mythology he raises a little to high.. The movie comes to the theatres on october 2nd.

Berlin Calling – Offizieller Trailer zum Film