Symposium Panel 7: The Rosenthals - Mainz - Lima - Mainz

In 2025, Film Studies and Media Dramaturgy at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz hosted a one-day international workshop with scholars, curators, students and archivists on the films of Kurt and Christine Rosenthal. The Rosenthals studied graphic design, painting, and film at various institutions including the Mainz University of Applied Sciences before moving to South America. From 1973 to 1999, the filmmaker couple lived in Peru and created a wide-ranging body of work, including several documentary films, some of which were commissioned by German public broadcasters and Dutch television stations. From 2000 until their joint death in 2023, they lived in Mainz, where they continued to work on films, paintings, and books. Their still relatively unknown work is the subject of an ongoing research and restoration project that stretches from Berlin to Mainz to Lima to San Sebastian and beyond.

Carolina Cappa is a film archivist, professor, and researcher. She works on the preservation and restoration of Latin American and non-commercial films, collaborating with numerous archives and universities. She is currently Head of Research at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE) in the Basque Country.

Julio César Gonzales Oviedo is a postdoctoral researcher at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), where he leads the project Counter-Visualities of Care: Community Archives, Visual Culture, and Political Ecology in the Andean Páramos. He is a member of the Research-Creation Group in Visual Studies and Moving Images at PUCP and the Seminar on Social, Solidarity and Popular Economy at UNMSM (Peru), working on visual culture, community communication, political organization, and the production of the commons.

Daniel Franz Meiller is a literary scholar, film editor, film restorer, and archivist. He studied Romance Studies and Comparative Literature as well as film editing at the University of Film and Television Babelsberg. From 1995 to 2006, he worked as a freelance editor for documentary and feature films. He subsequently worked as a film restorer at the Nederlands Filmmuseum, where his projects included work on Johan van der Keuken and Dutch experimental film. Since 2008, he has been Head of Audiovisual Collections at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin.

Markus Ruff studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin Visual Communication and Art and Media and at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. He is section head of archival projects at Arsenal Filminstitut, and is responsible for the collection management as well as digitization and restoration projects. Furthermore, he engages in training in the field of film archiving and preservation.

Alexandra Schneider is a professor of film studies at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. Her current research interests include: decentred film historiography, media archaeology and critical media history. She is also a Principal Investigator at the DFG Research Training Group 3064, ‘Technologies of Witnessing’'. Her recent publications include Children Reinventing Cinema. Snapshots from the 21(st) Century, published by Meson Press in 2025 and co-authored with Wanda Strauven.

Marc Siegel is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His current research focuses on anti-Palestinian racism. He is the editor of the bilingual book What’s Underground About Marshmallows? Texts by and about Jack Smith (Alexander Verlag, 2026) and co-editor of Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia (meson press, 2024). He is also a member of the Berlin-based CHEAP art collective and the Association of Palestinian and Jewish Academics in German-speaking countries (PJA).