BERLIN - Produced by Tuscan Leonardo Bigazzi for Tak Studioworks, the short film After Colossus by Indonesian director and artist Timoteus Anggawan Kusno reflects on a dark passage in the turbulent history of Indonesia, focussing on the collapse of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1999, a time that featured mass hysteria connected to the killing of alleged witchdoctors, a collective trauma he explores.
The short, in Competition at the Berlinale Shorts and previously screened at the last edition of 'Lo Schermo dell'Arte' in Florence, focuses on the discovery of mysterious documents by a group of researchers: disturbing reports, enigmatic photographs and fragmented recordings reveal a secret military project which took children from rural areas and subjected them to experiments and indoctrination.
The director used multiple formats to reconstruct the content that was discovered, from Super 8mm and digital 35mm to images generated by artificial intelligence from real historical and family photographic archives. After Colossus was produced by Lo Schermo dell'Arte with Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato with the support of Visio Production Fund, co-produced by TAK Studioworks.
Another Italian film in the 20 selected for Berlinale Shorts 2025 is a co-production that brings together Germany, Italy and Slovenia: Prekid Vatre is a short documentary by Jakob Krese that pays homage to those who bear lasting scars from the war in the former Yugoslavia on the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide and the end of the conflict.
The protagonist, Hazira, is a survivor of the massacre who has been living in the Ježevac refugee camp for almost 30 years. His is a life suspended, punctuated by monotonous survival rituals: collecting wood, obsessive cleaning; amidst the harsh conditions of life in the camp, in a world that seems to have already forgotten the experience of war and those still forced to deal with it up close.
“With this film, I want to express my indignation at the fact that people are still living in a refugee camp in the middle of Europe, 26 years after the war,” states the director. “The history of Yugoslavia is an integral part of European history, and the violent nationalism that once emerged there, seemingly from nowhere, is now re-emerging in other parts of Europe.”