Flying Ships, Berlin Storytelling
2012 · Germany
Directed by Dave Lojek
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, whimsical
A short documentation of visual artist Natalia Irina Roman's mixed-media installation, in which hundreds of paper boats hang suspended in the Prachtsaal Neukölln, a 200-square-meter former ballroom in Berlin. The piece is inspired by the forgotten dance venue and the artist's online storytelling platform.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a doc about an art installation, which sounds like the death of cinema—but Lojek's refusal to editorializ the thing, letting the boats just *be* without narrative scaffolding, is weirdly radical for 2012, when everyone was still trying to make meaning.
A formally precise treatment of a site-specific work that understands its debt to both expanded cinema and the gallery tradition; the Prachtsaal becomes a living archive, and the suspended paper boats function as a meditation on memory and spatial cinema that recalls Sitney's preoccupations.
What matters here isn't the installation itself but Lojek's decision to shoot it as pure spatial experience—the camera moves through negative space as much as the objects themselves, and that choreographic restraint transforms documentation into something visionary on a minimal budget.