I can't cry much louder than this

Synopsis

The media and the internet bring us images of events from all corners of the world — but personal experiences are not connected with them. We are at once interconnected and disconnected. We only have ourselves as starting and end points in this reflection.

Specs

German Title: Viel lauter kann ich nicht schreien

Genre: Essay Film

Production: AUT 2013

Running Time: 11 min 23 sec

Language: English (and alternative German version)

Shooting Format: Stock footage, mixed media

Aspect Ratio: 16:9

Sound Mix: Stereo LTRT

Sales | Distribution

sixpackfilm

Neubaugasse 45/13

A-1070 Vienna, Austria

Tel: +43 (0)1 526 09 90-0

Email: office@sixpackfilm.com

Cast

Barack Obama (archive footage)

Yousuf Raza Gilani (archive footage)

Morgan Tsvangirai (archive footgae)

Robert Cambrinus (all dubbing voices)

Crew

Writer/Director — Robert Cambrinus

Cameraman — Zafeiris Haitidis (Greece)

Offline Editor — Nathan Cubitt

Sound Designer — Kurt Strohmeier

Re-recording Mixer — Alexander Wieser

Online Editor — Peter Gstach (ZONE Media)

Music — Thalija

Music Recording & Mix — Robert Zirngast

Producer — Robert Stokvis

Awards

Special Mention — Go Short Film Festival (Nijmegen, Netherlands)

Audience Award — VIS Vienna Independent Shorts (Austria)

Silver Bear — Festival of Nations (Lenzing, Austria)

Festivals | Exhibitions

Diagonale (Graz, Austria) — Premiere

dokumentART (Neubrandenburg, Germany/Szczecin, Poland)

Jihlava Documentary Film Festival (Czech Republic)

Rio de Janeiro Short Film Festival (Brasil)

FENACO Film Festival (Lambayeque, Peru)

Molodist Film Festival (Kiev, Ukraine)

Int Festival of Independent Films 2morrow (Moscow, Russia)

Istanbul International Short Film Festival (Turkey)

Karama Human Rights Film Festival (Amman, Jordan)

International Short Film Week Regensburg (Germany)

Stuttgarter Filmwinter (Germany)

Flensburger Kurzfilmtage (Germany)

Short Film Festival Hamburg (Germany)

FiSH Film Festival (Rostock, Germany)

Backup Festival (Weimar, Germany)

Kasseler Dokfest (Germany)

Short Film Festival Winterthur (Switzerland)

LISFE Leiden Int Short Film Experience (the Netherlands)

Portobello Film Festival (London, Great Britain)

Nouak Short Film Festival (Nouakchott, Mauritania)

Brno 16 — Art makes us Stronger (Czech Republic)

Espresso Film - Open Air FestivalVienna, Austria

EU XXL Film Forum (Vienna, Austria)

Salotto Kunstsalon (Aspern, Austria)

dotdotdot Open Air Film Festival (Vienna, Austria)

Der Geteilte Himmel (Vienna, Austria) — installation

Shaping Democracy! (Vienna, Austria) — exhibition

Okto TV/Oktoskop (Vienna, Austria) — retrospective

sixpackfilms — Film of the Month (online)

Text by Drehli Robnik

Film scholar and critic

The title is programmatic – as a red herring. This is not a "film like an outcry" but a texture of motifs not heard, subjectivity expressed in a witty language-game. It deals with/consists of "raw" BBC news images of recent uprisings and disasters, with a commentary in subtitle-like inserts. This ego, this auctorial I, is to be read, not heard, as it reasons and resonates.

Chapter 1 is called I see things differently. It shows street protests, police violence, tear gas: Athens, Arab rebellions, London riots. "I can only speak for myself", the differently-seeing I says without speaking. I hear things differently: chapter 2 opens with ear-splitting gunfire in Lybia, but the I traces the hearing-differently back to Led Zeppelin: a ringing in the ear remains from a 1980 concert. We hear it in the film while the image flow takes us from tinnitus to tsunami (Japan 2011). Cars and boats are carried away. What is their destination? Perhaps the Aral Sea, now a desert with rusty shipwrecks in it. Before, to the sound of rock band Thalija, the film ends there on a biblical note (from anarchy to Ark), it detours into the mundane.

Entitled I have no voice, chapter 3 deals with dubbing, has Obama joking in a dubbed voice and lists all the stars lip-synced by a busy German dubbing actor. Another detour toys with closing (camera-)eyes as they look at images of protests: If I close the right eye, the image has a red hue; if I close the left eye, a green hue. Subjectivity translates into physics, politics, puns: One red image, one green – is that a 3D technology? A color-code? The left eye will see the red flags of Greek protests, the right one will see the Islamic green of Arabellion.

The hue refers to a color-tone as well as to hue and cry. So we return to the voiceless claim of the film's title: Crying is shouting out, but also a mute speech of eyes (especially eyes that see differently or feel like crying over how rebellion leads to theocracy). Crying is also what eyes do when hit by teargas – or squeezed shut for too long. This results in a hue from the eye, from the I to you.

A German version of this text can be downloaded as pdf.

Film Notes

Some notes I wrote are downloadable as pdf (in German).

In Conversation

Espressofilm Talk on 9 Aug 2013 with Gerhard Weber, sixpackfilm (in German). Downloadable as mp3.