And this was also the case with her grandfatherвЂ™s past, which can only be revealed to some extent through the preserved photographs. After the end of World War II, this past was collectively hushed up for a long time, with complicity being denied and formative experiences cloaked in silence. Having no memories of her own about her grandfather, only these photos provide information about his past. Her grandfatherвЂ™s story is reconstructed on the basis of filmed photographs that he had kept in an album and which act as anchor points for Sylvia Schedelbauer to recount his story. Indeed, already back in 2008 she received the German Film Critics Award in the Best Experimental Film Category for FALSCHE FREUNDE (вЂњFalse FriendsвЂќ).Д®RINNERUNGEN (вЂњMemoriesвЂќ) В© Sylvia SchedelbauerД®RINNERUNGEN (вЂњMemoriesвЂќ), one of her earliest filmic works from 2004, is a personal insight into the life of her grandfather on her fatherвЂ™s side, who served as a soldier in the Third Reich and met his end in Stalingrad. Her films have been screened internationally at numerous festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the London Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, and have won awards such as the VG Bildkunst Prize and the Gus Van Sant Award for the Best Experimental Film. There, she worked on a project that positioned her own origin story in a larger context of European-Japanese history. In 2019, Sylvia Schedelbauer was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. With her distinctly unique cinematic style being defined by carefully selected and composed scenes, abstractions and the utilisation of various rhythmisation techniques. The child of a Japanese mother and German father, the friction points between these two cultures represent the places and locations she gently examines in her experimental films, permitting her to speak about collective memories that question transnational relationships above and beyond her own biography, and that across the generations. And her experimenting with ever-new technical possibilities has accompanied her to the present day, as analogue and digital recording technologies converge in her works. In this academic environment with its openness to experiment, her first encounters with the film medium occurred.

She studied fine arts here under Katharina Sieverding at the University of the Arts Berlin.

Sylvia Schedelbauer grew up in Tokyo and moved to Berlin in 1993, where she has lived and worked since then. On viewing her films вЂ“ which are as sensitive as they are experimental вЂ“ the feeling quickly arises of delving deep into the filmmakerвЂ™s world of thoughts and ideas, even if only small, well-chosen excerpts from her life are revealed therein. Fragmentary memories act like a common thread, taking us through the works of Sylvia Schedelbauer as they oscillate between experimental and essay-film genres, and which could also be called вЂњfilmic memoriesвЂќ.

Flickery war footage