Irena Vrkljan: Im Gegenlicht

12.10.2024 – 13.10.2024

With: Slavenka Drakulić (online), Marko Pogačar and Leon Rizmaul

“Berlin 1966. The film academy on Pommernallee. I was thirty-six. […] The film academy was the most foreign place in my life. Corridors with neon lights, shiny, cold linoleum, the young people bossy, spoiled, sexless.” (Irena Vrkljan: Marina, im Gegenlicht)

Irena Vrkljan (born 1930 in Belgrade, died 2021 in Zagreb) was an extremely productive writer, audiobook and television author, filmmaker and translator, who moved in her life and in writing between Germany, Yugoslavia, and Croatia. She left behind a bilingual, rich, aesthetically and politically significant body of work that has been received very differently historically in Germany and (the former) Yugoslavia, but whose cross-disciplinary diversity is still largely unexplored.

When Irena Vrkljan moved from Zagreb to Berlin in 1966 to study at the newly founded Film and Television Academy (DFFB), she was not only significantly older than most students in what would later become the legendary first class, but she also brought with her life experiences that created a certain distance between her and her fellow students. She had experienced Nazi occupation and war in Belgrade and Zagreb and had already made a name for herself and a living as a poet and television writer in what was now socialist Yugoslavia. “Berlin 1966” thus meant the risk of a new beginning in exile, in a city that was still scarred by the traces of war and barbarism. Irena Vrkljan’s studies at the DFFB were made possible by a fellowship from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in literature. Writing remained central to her work: translations, prose, poems, soon her first radio play, an ongoing exploration of her life “zwischen Süd und West” (between South and West), as she later titled one of her novels.

Curators Borjana Gaković and Tobias Hering have organized a two-day program that provides an initial introduction to the multifaceted nature of her work, starting from her personal turning point “Berlin 1966.” Featuring exhibits, an introductory lecture, a reading, a two-part film program and context-providing discussions with guests from Zagreb—former Artists’ Program fellows, writers Slavenka Drakulić and Marko Pogačar, and director Leon Rizmaul—the daadgalerie and fsk cinema will present the works and contexts of her early Zagreb years, including two episodes from the TV cultural series she initiated Portreti i susreti (Portraits and encounters), as well as four films that Irena Vrkljan made in Berlin.

Program

October 12, 2024, daadgalerie, Oranienstraße 161
Free entry
In original language and English

3–4 pm
Welcome and introduction
Borjana Gaković and Tobias Hering

4:30–6:30pm
Film program and talk with Leon Rizmaul (Zagreb)

Irenino ogledalo / Irena`s Mirror (HRV 2016), Regie: Leon Rizmaul, 9 min, OmeU

Gradovi sanjaju ljude / Towns Dream of People (YU 1966), Portreti i susreti ( Porträts und Begegnungen, Radiotelevizija Zagreb), Regie: Ante Viculin, Szenario: Irena Vrkljan, 14 min, OmeU

Četiri zida oko mene / Four Walls Around Me (YU 1965), Portreti i susreti ( Porträts und Begegnungen, Radiotelevizija Zagreb), Regie: Ante Viculin, Szenario: Irena Vrkljan, 16 min, OmeU

7–8:30pm
Irena Vrkljan, Tochter zwischen Süd und West
Discussion of Vrkljan’s literary work with Slavenka Drakulić (online) and Marko Pogačar

October 13, 2024, fsk-Kino am Oranienplatz
Free entry
In original language and English

2:30–5:30 pm
Film program and reading
with Borjana Gaković and Tobias Hering

Widmung für ein Haus (1966)
Faroqhi dreht (Germany 1967)
Berlin unverkäuflich (1967)
Berlin (1969)

Berlin unverkäuflich (FRG 1967) and Berlin (FRG 1969) were digitized in 2024 as part of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program’s archive project funded by digiS (Forschungs- und Kompetenzzentrum Digitalisierung Berlin) in partnership with the Deutsche Kinemathek.

Photo: Dario Njavro (HRT)