This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past

Two young women wander through a mall. They goof around, try on sunglasses, show off for the camera that is recording them on black-and-white Super 8 film and flick through photos of other people striking similar poses. A series of absurdly contradictory desires can be heard on the soundtrack – to predict the past, to rouse the alarm clock from sleep, to forget what one cannot remember. A day like any other, this could be any place, at any time. Then the date on a memorial plaque allows us to place the scene. We are at the Olympia Shopping Centre in Munich, where nine teenagers with an immigrant background were killed and others injured in a racist attack on July 22, 2016. The photos – plucked, as so often in Bilir-Meier's work, from her family archive – show scenes from “Düşler Ülkesi” (Land of Dreams), a play Bilir-Meier's mother helped put on whose 1982 premiere was delayed by a bomb scare.
Continuities and ruptures emerge between the everyday lives of migrants then and now, between youthful levity and the persistence of racist violence in Germany. (Uli Ziemons)

Cana Bilir-Meier, born in 1986 in Munich, Germany. She studied art education and visual arts as well as film and works as a filmmaker, artist and art educator in Munich and Vienna.

Production Cana Bilir-Meier. Written and directed by Cana Bilir-Meier. Cinematography Lichun Tseng. Editing Cana Bilir-Meier. Music Gustavo Kusnir, Nihan Devecioğlu. Casting Zühal Bilir-Meier. With Sosuna Yıldız, Aleyna Osmanoğlu, Berfin Ünsal.

Films: 2013: Semra Ertan (8 min.). 2017: Bestes Gericht (3 min.). 2019: This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past.

Bonus Material