Former East / Former West
Shelly Silver
Made up of hundreds of street interviews done in Berlin two years after the Reunification, Former East/Former West is a vital, surprisingly open, and at times disturbing documentary about what it means to be German at this particular moment in history. For forty-five years, residents of this divided city lived radically different lives, both in terms of ideology and everyday experience. Silver questions the very notion of a shared language, focusing on changing definitions of words for political and economic systems – democracy, freedom, capitalism, socialism ‒ as well as words used to describe nations and identity, like nationality, Germany, history, foreigners, home.
Shelly Silver
Shelly Silver is a New York based artist exploring contested territories between public and private, narrative and documentary, and increasingly in recent years the watcher and the watched. She has exhibited worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum, the London ICA, and the London, Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin Film Festivals.
Films by Shelly Silver (Selection)
5 Lessons and 9 Questions about Chinatown 2009 | In Complete World 2008 | Suicide 2003 | 37 Stories About Leaving Home 1996 | Former East/Former West 1994 | April 2nd 1994 | We 1990 | Getting in. 1989 | Things I Forget to Tell Myself 1989 | Meet the People 1986
