Day 5: Work

Admin — 2025-02-16T01:46:41Z

!!! ATTENTION Change of venue !!!

We will NOT be at Potsdamer Platz today, but invite everyone to the BALZ Atelier
Beusselstraße 35, 10553 Berlin-Moabit, Directions: S-Bahnhof Beusselstraße
Map: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/6946228678
There is barrier-free access. If you are unable to climb stairs, please register by phone:
+49 176 58 87 37 70

Sunday, 16 February 2025, 7:00 - 09:30 pm

Supporting films
Passenger Princess (Great Britain) [1]
Patrick Brontë, Worker (USA)
Don't Come Back, Kid (China)

Main film
Corsa Abusiva (Italy)

The concept of ‘work'

What does a taxi driver's work consist of?
In Passenger Princess we see the work of a people-chauffeur as it is carried out by millions of colleagues worldwide. The film implicitly asks what a taxi is. Can a vehicle and its driver, who do not belong to the legendary London black cabs, be called a taxi or taxi driver? How do they differ from the perfect connoisseurs of London, who are considered the best taxi drivers in the world?

Patrick Brontë, Worker is about the future of the taxi industry in the form of a look into the past. The profession and the qualification of the taxi driver are often compared to that of weavers or blacksmiths, who had to give way to industrialisation. The mechanical loom would have been for the weavers what the navigation apps are for the taxi drivers today, it is said. Regardless of whether this is true or not, both old professions have found their place in modern society. The millions of impoverished artisans have disappeared and the bulk of fabrics are industrially manufactured. The modern descendants of the old artisans are educated people who know how to give their craftsmanship a new social role. Their example is a stimulus for a new form of the profession of taxi driving.

The main character in Don't Come Back, Kid is looking for a way out of the plight into which the ancient craft of jade carving has been pushed by the fully automated production of the jade objects so prized in China. Unlike the coral merchant in Joseph Roth's Leviathan, he tries not to lose his own identity and ultimately perish through the loss of the spirituality of ‘real' materials. After completing his studies, he decides to use all his knowledge to successfully lead craftsmanship and family tradition into the modern age.

In the main film Corsa Abusiva, we experience what it means to be on the road with an illegal tax'. At first, everything looks quite normal, only the missing taxi sign on the roof distinguishes the car and its work from ‘real' taxis. The absence of rules, the brutal competition without regulation gradually reveals consequences that no working person would want to experience. This film is a warning to anyone tempted to get behind the wheel of an illegal Uber rental car.

[1] Replacement screening. During the screening at Potsdamer Platz, the cold and technical problems prevented us from showing Passenger Princess. We will make up for it today in the warmth. Coffee, snacks and cold drinks from the refrigerator will be available in the BALZ studio.

Day 4 : It's Not Easy Having A Good Time

editors — 2025-02-15T08:21:16Z

Wilde Renate Party

February 15. Starting 21:00 CET

We have decided to organise a special evening at Club Wilde Renate. The parallels between the story of the evening's main film and the fate of the club are simply too great not to do so. Besides, who wants to celebrate a premiere at while camping at North Pole ;-)

Luck needs time and favourable circumstances. To bring this about against all odds is the impossible task of the Taxi Film Festival and its initiators from the Taxi Culture Team.

Art of the Common People

We live in a world whose circumstances often make it impossible for the producers of culture to recognise themselves as such. This is apparently only possible in a few, historically unique moments. The ballet of cranes and the symphony of factory sirens of post-revolutionary constructivism, as the child of working-class culture and the avant-garde will to art through their association born out of a brief moment of progressive happiness , are the most famous example of this.

Our main film on the fourth day of the Taxifilmfest, Wat Neuet im Westen snatches such a historical moment, its place and its protagonists from the Orcus of oblivion. We almost forgot about the ‘Ruine' (ruin) ourselves, until Daya and Anna suggested their documentary film for the Taxifilmfest. Using a taxi driver's Super 8 images, they fill in our gaps in memory. That alone secures their film a place on the list of our favourite films this year.

The Golden West

Westberlin, which can only be written like this here, ‘was not part of the FRG and was not allowed to be governed by it', an impoverished city, subsidized with the tax money paid by West-German proletariat. It served as a showcase of the alleged freedom of the West. It was about freedom under the knout of the world-wide murdering US-imperialism. The USA's Vietnam War had long since surpassed the French war in Indochina in brutality and was won by the Vietnamese people. In the USA, a stab-in-the-back myth was invented that was very similar to the German one. While the old elites were already doing business among their own kind again all over Western Europe, a socio-cultural biotope of small and not-so-small crooks and rip-off artists had emerged under the drizzle of anti-communist aid to the frontline city.

West Berlin was the city of upstarts and court jesters of capitalism. During the times of the Ruine at Winterfeldplatz, the bourgeois class, high society, had long since fled the capital of German capitalism for fear of the communists, settling in Munich, Hamburg or even Düsseldorf. Berlin was left to those who were too poor to build new fortunes in West Germany or who had only learnt how to survive in the war. The most cunning of them were called Karsten Klingbeil and Sigrid Kressmann-Zschach, who tapped into millions in subsidies and could never get enough of their mouths full during their lifetime. Their hideous monuments paid for by West German taxpayers characterise Berlin to this day.

Stay clean

Those less successful and without the best connections in the highest circles of the Walled City had to be content with manufactory or pub empires.

Subsidies were available to all. The shivering allowance, as it was mockingly called, added eight percent to every fictitious or real wage payment. From 1971, three billion marks a year ended up in the pay packets of West Berlin workers and those who employed fictitious workers. A P-Schein [1] earned each student who did not want to work alongside their studies eight percent of their fictitious earned income per month. [2] Every taxi company was able to pay a fictitious student employee a few hundred Deutschmarks a month for what they considered to be doing nothing. In view of rents of between 35 and 120 Deutschmarks for one- to two-room apartments, the P-Schein, together with the Bafög, guaranteed university studies without meed to waste time with a bullshit job. ‘Stay clean' [3] became the farewell greeting of clever West Berliners.

Freedom and art

Without standard periods of study and masterisation according to the Lisbon Convention, ‘eternal students' were able to pursue their artistic inclinations for many years in adequately subsidised bar jobs. Some created remarkable things. How, under these circumstances, material and artistic freedom interacted is told in Wat Neuet im Westen.

Erich Maria Remarque would have enjoyed a youth that cheerfully scraped together a living from the ruins of the last great war.

The evening programme ‘Nightlife'

The Taxi Film Festival presents a daily cinema programme in feature film length with supporting film.

Today Artist, Tonight Taxist shows a Romania that initially feels like the idyll of the Walled City, where art and easy money at the wheel of a taxi harmonised. Today's bohemians resemble their predecessors, but are poorer and live in more miserable conditions than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries [4].

No Where shows a futuristic, rich and cold China, where people find it difficult to come together.

After so much melancholy, we show a short optimistic outlook on the seemingly impossible, before we dive into Wat Neuet im Westen (Ruins)by Daya Lavine Sieber, and Anna Herrmann

The Taxikultur team wishes you a pleasant and enlightening evening.

[1] P-Schein (Personenbeförderungsschein try to pronounce it and you will understand why the term was used even its similarity to LTI-terms.) is the popular term for the official German ‘driver's licence for passenger transport', also known as a taxi or bus driver's licence.

[2] The amount of student income exempt from social security contributions was unlimited during lecture-free periods. Only the rules of the Bafög capped the additional income of students.

[3] ‘Stay clean' meant do your business without getting caught because of too much greed

[4] SPOILER ALERT transporting an Germin tourist turns out bein dangerous for the romanian taxi driver.

TAXIFILMFEST