Kitchener-Berlin

Directed by Philip Hoffman

"As passing through/torn formations concerns his mother's family heritage, Kitchener-Berlin revolves around his father's family hometown. The slash and the hyphen in the titles suggest both severance from the past and connections to it, an ambivalence that is especially poignant for the descendants of the area's German settlers. The history of the area underpins the film, but refuses to bind it or restrict it from free association. Hoffman assembles a wide range of visual materials, including home movies, television news footage, and archival film, as well as his own characteristically enticing images, to build complex layers of superimpositions analogous to the impressions of memory." (Blaine Allen)