Cosmos Ottinger movie program - Paris Calligrammes

Every departure begins with a farewell: the year is 1962, when Ulrike Ottinger sets off from her hometown of Constance to Paris because the political situation in Germany has become unbearable for her. On the way, she is forced to leave her sky-blue Isetta, painted with owls, at the side of the road with engine trouble. The journey continues as a hitchhiker in a large black Citroën with five gentlemen in hats and coats, who Ottinger describes as "like bank robbers or actors in a film noir". Can a story that begins like this lead to anything other than a great adventure? 

"I was 20 years young and had come to Paris with the firm goal of becoming a great artist," Ottinger recalls. In "Paris Calligrammes", she takes up the challenge of making a film "from the perspective of a very young artist, which I remember, with the experience of an older artist, which I am today". 

In a dense stream of acoustic and visual archive material, combined with her own artistic and cinematic works, Ottinger revives Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Quartier Latin with their literary cafés and jazz cellars, encounters with representatives of the Jewish exile, living together with her artist friends, the world of thought of Parisian ethnologists and philosophers, the political upheavals of the Algerian War and May 68 and the legacy of the colonial era.

"I followed the traces of my heroes and heroines," says Ottinger, "and wherever I found them, they will appear in this film."

Ottinger found many of them in the German antiquarian bookshop "Librairie Calligrammes" run by Jewish exile Fritz Picard, who had fled to France from the Nazis around 25 years earlier.For Ulrike Ottinger, the "Librairie Calligrammes" becomes "a place where the hope of bringing back together a world that had been brutally unhinged", a lived and animated utopia."Paris Calligrammes" was awarded the German Documentary Film Prize of the Norbert Daldrop Foundation for Art and Culture at the SWR Dokufestival.