Saturday, September 30, 7pm Cinema im Ostertor

Renate Lorenz
Copy me – I want to travel

A film by Renate Lorenz, Brigitta Kuster, Pauline Boudry, Bulgaria/Germany 2004, 86 min
The copy that is the subject of this film was manufactured in Bulgaria, where in the 1980s the western product Apple II was dismantled and reassembled as the eastern product Pravetz II. Unofficially it is a copy. Officially it is a Bulgarian product, and it came with a full set of collective desires – it was intended as a mass product which would help the small country Bulgaria catch up with the USA and outsmart the West. Women took on a special role in its production, often working in high positions and, to loan a Bulgarian idiom, “carrying three watermelons under one arm" – good activists, good housewives and good workers all at once.
Together, three woman filmmakers and three woman computer specialists take a research trip through the history of the Bulgarian computer industry. The fact that the filmmakers’ view of the images of the cold war is critical and yet caught up in them brings about staged images that infuse the film like some strange version of classic espionage films. Pauline Boudry’s family came from Bulgaria to Switzerland, and the first movie Pauline saw with them was called Le parapluie bulgare. It was about the tricked-out umbrella of a Bulgarian agent.
The music for the film was produced by rhythm king and her friends.

Screening and discussion with Renate Lorenz