In Berlin Elsewhere, strangers meet at a place of mental captivity. They suffer from common social maladies, neurosis, bipolarity, fetishism, and fetishism of commodities. A place that is somewhere between exclusion, madness, and struggle. What kind of Madness does our society permit before someone is confined? What is confinement in the era of medication? Many actions that required confinement in former times no longer do, but our society still shares the assumption that the loss of civil rights are akin to madness, immigration, and poverty. The daily mechanisms of exclusion start in childhood and are an expression of the society we live in. Interdependencies between poverty, madness and civil rights have not changed for centuries, it seems. The city of Berlin is the perfect example of a “locked up” and “excluded” city, where segregation, madness, and confinement have historically played a strong role: Unemployed people from the new federal states who were unable to get a foot in the door in the years following reunification; Immigrants who studied in East Berlin and were able to live in the city legally but lost their civil rights with the fall of the Wall and were stranded without the option to return to “their” countries. Passengers par excellence, like the medieval ships of fools, whose passengers did not fit the fixed social norms and were abandoned to the endless waters. We’re left with the uneasy presentiment that a long lost ship might one day return, or that such ships might again be created, clandestinely, and set off anew, again and again. Thanks God we will always have the BBC to show that it is much worse somewhere else. The madness can begin, in Berlin Elsewhere.

Duration: 105 min.

A production by CONSTANZA MACRAS | Dorkypark and the Schaubuehne am Lehniner Platz Berlin in coproduction with HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts Dresden, Maison des Arts de Creteil, the Perspectives Festival Saarbruecken and Tanzhaus nrw. Funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the Regierender Buergermeister Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten.