Film poem, 16mm, b&w, optical sound mono, 1:1,37, 60 minutes, Germany, 2025
Film poem, 16mm, b&w, digital copy or DCP, 4:3, stereo or 4.1 surround sound, 60 min, Germany, 2025
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.... welcome to a journey of discovery through a multilayered subjective portrait along and across the borders of the European Union !
“For his film project "12 ASTERISCI" (after the twelve stars on the European flag), the german artist Telemach Wiesinger visited numerous places on the internal and external borders of the European Community and transformed them into seemingly remote black and white locations with the help of his 16mm film camera. Removed from the current political debates of the day, the sometimes archaic-looking artefacts reveal the anachronistic character of these ultimately arbitrary demarcations and borders. The montage places the scenes in a continuous "flow". This open, experimental form has the effect of visually loosening the boundaries and thus aesthetically overcoming their rigid regulations”.(Jörg Schöning, CINEGRAPH, Hamburg)
Audio Mix / Mastering: Alexander Grebtschenko
Participation: Osias & Alexander Bügel, Markus Dörner, Fabienne Dressler, Hagen Glötter, Till Gombert, Stefan Johnen, Projektförderung Stadt Freiburg, Sabine Rollberg, Charly Schillinger, Ute Schöler, Jörg Schöning, Thomas Tode, Andreas Wiesenack, Johannes Wolfsperger
World Premiere: 61th Mostra Internationale del Nuevo cinema / Pesaro / Italy 18th June 2025
Awards:
PREMIO DELLA CRITICA ITALIANA SNCCI in collaborazione con AFIC
The SNCCI award (critics award) for „12 ASTERISCI“ is bestowed with the following motivations: For its ability to show through images, concrete and symbolic at the same time, the contemporary political and (anti)human drift. Furthermore, thanks to the layered work on sound, the author evokes a historical dimension that allows the past to mirror itself in the present, creating unsettling questions about the future.
The international jury / Concorso 61th Mostra Internationale del Nuevo cinema gives the first „SPECIAL MENTION“ to the film „12 ASTERISCI“ by Telemach Wiesinger
“For its acute and deep ability to openly question us on the state of the European continent, by revealing the sinister echoes of closed borders and past wars, urgently putting back in our hands the singular and plural responsibility of actively fighting violence. In particular, the film innovates the relation between sounds and images through the composition of a sound track which becomes an actual essay, to be read and listened to.”
„BEST FEATURE FILM“ 7th Flight Mostra internazionale del Cinema di Genova
The jury has decided to award the feature film prize to „12 ASTERISCI“:
“This film-poem reminds us that there must be established borders in order for countries to exist. But to say “country” is also to say “nation,” and necessarily, “nationalism”. Through the constructed, refined, and radical forms of a black-and-white journey that is somehow motionless between the north and the south of Europe, with its variations of light and contrast, 12 ASTERISCI demonstrates, in its formal approach, the invisibility of what we call borders or boundaries, and consequently, from a geographical perspective, the arbitrariness of their delineation. Through the filmmaker’s formal choices, the juxtaposition of all these views is not meant to form a whole, but rather to place the idea of Europe in the past of itself.”
Selected Festivals:
- Mostra del Cinema di Genova, 2024
- In The Palace, Bulgarien, 2025
- Experimental Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilien, 2025
- Cinemistica Film Festival, Granada, Spanien, 2025
- L’Europe autour de l’Europe (Europe by Europe Festival), Paris, 2026
- Riga Short Film Festival, Litauen, 2026
Review:
12 ASTERISCI by Telemach Wiesinger is one of the most anticipated films at the 61° Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro.
On the other hand, we are faced with a brutally lucid and disenchanted work, through borders, war architecture and symbolic places of division, fundamental to questioning the present through the ruins of the past. A film that moves fluidly between documentary realism and poetic expression, balancing objectivity with subjective perception, while interrogating the very notion of what it means for a war to end.
A black-and-white road movie
There is a Europe that knows no respite, a continent that seems to have buried its wars, but actually keeps them under its skin, ready to resurface in every crack of its political geography.
As stated by Wiesinger himself:
„The research started in Germany, with its history of East-West division, and then proceeded along its internal borders. Like in a road movie and in the wake of curiosity, the views widen outwards, reaching all EU member states and their outposts. The diversity of temperatures, seasons and weather conditions is perceptible, as is the specific atmosphere of both Europe's physical and intangible borders. The camera and microphone explore and interrogate reality . Superimpositions of the visible and the audible, sometimes synchronous and sometimes not, oscillate between documentary and moments of epiphany.“
12 ASTERISCI and the echo of conflicts
Never were words more apt, probably. In the 60 minutes of 12 Asterisk, the shots delve into the meanders of the continent’s wartime memory, composing a narrative mosaic that crosses borders, eras and identities.
Wiesinger works with a dry, unadorned realism: the camera lingers on the architecture of war, on air-raid shelters, on bridges that unite and separate. From the unmistakable Siegfried Line, a relic of the Nazi past, to Slavonski Brod, a city overwhelmed by the Yugoslav wars and bombed in the 1990s. From Fort St. Angelo in Malta, a historic symbol of resistance to Italian and German aerial bombardment, to the emblematic Nicosia, the last European capital still divided by the famous “green line” (Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot).
For those looking for solutions or reassurance on the horizon, this is not the right film. On the contrary, 12 Asterisci forces one to look at – and perhaps understand – that peace in Europe is still a precarious balance: silences, omissions and traces that have never been completely erased. Practically a bomb that has never stopped ticking. (Francesco Cretella, www.taxidrivers.it)
