Directors Lounge Screening presents a collaborative project of twenty independent, experimental filmmakers: The Space Between Cities. Presented by Berlin Filmmaker Insa Langhorst.

Last year, Salise Hughes founder of EXcinema, Seattle, commissioned an exceptional project to bring together filmmakers, resulting in twenty films by international experimental filmmakers spread across four continents which were then combined as one feature length road film. The Spaces Between Cities is a collaboration made in the form of an exquisite corpse. Each film connects randomly to the next by way of a series of prompts creating a continuous road trip, or journey that will connect these different parts of the world.

Urban Research Istanbul Berlin presents short films between experimental and documentary exploring the public sphere in different cities. In collaboration with curator Burak Cevik from Istanbul we show films which deal in very personal ways with current and with historical urban developments and their problems.

The very personal point of view of the different filmmakers makes it possible to create a relation between different places and times, between the disappearance of old quarters, the violence that families have to endure in kurdish areas, the circumstance that led to the self-immolation of a turkish immigrant in Germany, and the juxtaposition of the story  of Jewish family in Italy during WW2 against the backdraft of Italo-Fascist Architecture in Rome.

In an experimental approach to film, the mirror as a reflective device is used more in its concrete dimension that in the metaphorical: the mirror surface denounces the cinematographic transparency, the famous "window to the world" dear to André Bazin and manifests its power of illusion, infinitely poetic.

This programme will give rise to various speculations about the self-portrait, memory, landscape, but also on the presence of mirrors in Hollywood movies that reveals a double or the narcissistic staging full of doubts and anguish.