Sunday | October 22, 2000 7:00 pm

Fate
(Verhängnis)

Director in Person
Screening on Film

Directed by Fred Kelemen.
With Valerij Fedorenko, Sanja Spengler.
Germany, 1994, 16mm, color, 79 min.
German with English subtitles.

Fred Kelemen’s acclaimed debut feature, Fate is a brilliant, intensely personal exploration of the destinies of lost souls. Through the course of a single night, the film follows a Russian accordion player and then his girlfriend across a seedy and hostile Berlin. Loosely episodic encounters with tango, vodka, billiards, infidelity, rape, and death accrue to create a strangely beautiful visual poem about the starkness of life in contemporary Europe. The film was shot in long, slow takes by Kelemen on Hi-8 video and then transferred to 16mm, not only to enhance the mobility of his camera work but to allow him to destroy the "purity of the images" in order to "create something warm."