Mein Leben Teil 2 (Audio description)

Angelika Levi’s film MEIN LEBEN TEIL 2 (Germany 2003) had an audio description track created for it as part of its 2021 digital restoration and has since then been available as a version for the visually impaired as part of arsenal distribution (and on our streaming platform arsenal 3, just like various other films with audio description tracks). Audio description is about detailing visual impressions which are spoken in the gaps between dialogue and sounds and enable blind people and those with visual impairments to gain access to films and thus to cultural life in society. Audio description is on the one hand an important element of accessibility and inclusion, but also its own unique art form. Visual information relevant to the understanding and aesthetic experience of the film has to be put into words in concise, precise form. This information includes places, landscapes and objects, what people look like, their actions, facial expressions and gestures. Together with the dialogue, sound and music, this is how a film for the visually impaired comes into being.

In MEIN LEBEN TEIL 2, Angelika Levi reveals the different layers of her family’s history, starting from her mother Ursula Levi, who was born in 1926, survived the war with her mother and brother in Germany as a so-called “half Jew”, moved to Chile in 1947 to join her father, who had emigrated there in 1938, before later returning to Germany as a biologist, where she married a Protestant priest and started a family with him. The repressed, the hidden, the out of place and the spoken and unspoken become visible. In addition to words, what carries memories here are the broadest range of different materials: audio cassettes, 16mm and Super8 home movies, digital film footage, photos, letters, diaries and notes, a cup, pressed flowers. Angelika Levi: “My mother collected and archived her own story. I inherited it and made a film out of it which is first and foremost about perception, legacy and how to approach history.”

Whether visually impaired or otherwise, we invite everyone to listen to the audio description of MEIN LEBEN TEIL 2 without the accompanying images in the silent green Kuppelhalle and to allow mental images to be created as a result. (al) (Annette Lingg)