But Elsewhere Is Always Better – A Retrospective of the Work of Vivian Ostrovsky
11/29/2025, 5 PM
Experimental short films
With Vivian Ostrovsky, Ulrike Ottinger, Elena Baumeister, Madeleine Bernstorff, Esther Buss, Heinz Emigholz and Birgit Kohler
Curated by Stephan Ahrens, Petra Palmer and Sissi Tax
- Location:
Hanseatenweg Studio - Date:
11/29/2025 - Time:
5 PM - Price:EUR 7.50 (Reduced: EUR 5)
- Languages: English
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29 Nov, 5 and 8 pm
Day ticket € 7,50/530 Nov, 4, 6 and 8 pm
Day ticket € 7,50/5
For more than four decades, Vivian Ostrovsky’s extraordinary films ‒ as profound as they are funny ‒ have been screened at international festivals. Her cinematic oeuvre is being extensively honoured in Germany for the first time.
Vivian Ostrovsky (b. 1945 in New York) grew up in Rio de Janeiro. She is the daughter of Jewish parents, George and Anya Ostrovsky, who fled from Prague to Brazil to escape the threat of National Socialism. After the military coup in March 1964, she left Brazil and has since lived in Paris, where she studied psychology and film. Ostrovsky began her filmmaking career as a feminist. Since the mid-1970s, she has not only showcased films about women but also fought against the obstacles that female filmmakers face in producing and distributing their works. Together with Esta Marshall, Ostrovsky organised the Women by Women festival, which included works by unknown American directors. It was followed in 1975 by the Femmes/Films festival, featuring films by Chantal Akerman, Jacqueline Audry and Agnès Varda, among others. Claudia von Alemann, María Luisa Bemberg, May Zetterling, Márta Mészáros, and other women directors participated in the festival. As a consequence, Ostrovsky decided to found her own film distribution company, aiming to bring films by women from as many countries as possible to the cinema.
From then on, she travelled from festival to festival and from city to city with copies of those films. Her film programme brought together diverse genres and styles, including underground and avant-garde, as well as feature films and documentaries, always with a focus on the situation of women around the globe. Ostrovsky’s own cinematic work began with a Super 8 film camera. Getting to know another person, relationships, and networks are the foundation of her film portraits. These range from closer looks at individual artists, such as the Brazilian painter Ione Saldanha (CORrespondência e REcorDAÇÕES, 2013) and the writer Clarice Lispector (Hiatus, 2018), to the intimate recollections of the Belgian film director and her long-time confidante Chantal Akerman in Mais ailleurs c’est toujours mieux (2016) and Son Chant (2021).
Vivian Ostrovsky travels, shoots movies, stays in motion, and montages her footage into collages as she experiments. She represents a type of American in Paris, whose concept for a pictorial construction represents the diversity of places, the transitory, and a state of possibility. However, to describe her as an American filmmaker would be misleading; to label her as European or French would be equally misleading. Her idiom, both in its style of speaking and its aesthetics, contradicts a linear, unambiguous attribution. Her pictorial compositions are organised heterarchically, not hierarchically. Everything is equally significant. “Jetlag Production” is the name that Ostrovsky gave to her production company.
Formally, her early films can be described as collages, as “mosaïque-diaries” (Yann Beauvais). With her camera, she captured moments that she sometimes only looked at years later and then compiled into films. Starting in the 1990s, Ostrovsky began weaving together found footage materials. These are the humorous moments, the everyday, and the musicalisation and rhythmicisation that characterise her films. Eat (1964), the title of a film by Andy Warhol, which shows a man eating a mushroom, was shot with a fixed camera in one continuous take over the course of hours. The flip side is a film with the same name, Ostrovsky’s Eat (1988), a 15-minute observation of the table manners of people and animals. This work evokes associations with the comical, as it often does in various similar ways through actions. She also dedicated a film to this phenomenon (Tatitude, 2009).
The retrospective But Elsewhere Is Always Better is the first to introduce the scope of Ostrovsky’s influential body of work and her actions, both as a filmmaker and a passionate film mediator ‒ as a ”passeuse de films”. The title of the retrospective presentation of Ostrovsky’s works is derived from her short film But Elsewhere Is Always Better, in which she looks back at her friendship with Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman.
The retrospective of Ostrovsky’s works was curated by Stephan Ahrens, Petra Palmer and Sissi Tax.
The film series “But Elsewhere Is Always Better” is funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund). It takes place at two locations in Berlin: the Akademie der Künste and Zeughauskino (17 Nov – 13 Dec).
