But Elsewhere Is Always Better

For over four decades, Vivian Ostrovsky's extraordinary, enigmatic, and humorous films have been featured at international festivals. The filmmaker promotes young directors, and curators value her expertise in film history. The retrospective But Elsewhere Is Always Better presents Ostrovsky's influential work in its entirety for the first time—both as a filmmaker and as a passionate film educator, a “passeuse de films.”

Vivian Ostrovsky, born on November 17, 1945, in New York, grew up in Rio de Janeiro as the child of George and Anya Ostrovsky, who had fled from Prague to Brazil to escape the Nazi threat. After the military coup in March 1964, Ostrovsky left Brazil. She then lived in Paris, where she studied psychology and film.

Vivian Ostrovsky began making films as a feminist. Since the mid-1970s, she has not only shown films by women, but also fought against the obstacles that female filmmakers face in the production and distribution of their works. Together with Esta Marshall, Ostrovsky organized the Women by Women festival, which showcased works by unknown American female directors, among others. This is 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 female directors took part in the festival and symposium La Femme dans le cinéma, after which Ostrovsky decided to found her own distribution company in order to bring films by women from as many countries around the world as possible to the cinema.

At a time when international phone calls were expensive and there was no email or internet, this cinema pioneer succeeded in bringing together and networking female filmmakers and women interested in film. Ostrovsky traveled from festival to festival and city to city with copies of her films, including Berlin. Her film programs brought together different genres and styles: underground and avant-garde, feature films and documentaries, always with a focus on the situation of women worldwide.

Vivian Ostrovsky has made numerous friends and gained a wealth of experience in the course of her work, which ultimately led to her own avant-garde film work. Since the early 1980s, she has been shooting films with a Super 8 camera, which have been shown at festivals and in cinemas around the world. These are films of a special kind, capable of transcending geographical boundaries and the passage of time. (Stephan Ahrens, Petra Palmer, Sissi Tax)

The film series But Elsewhere Is Always Better will take place at two locations in Berlin. On November 29 and 30, all of Vivian Ostrovsky's films will be shown in curated programs at the Akademie der Künste in Hanseatenweg. The Zeughauskino will present a film series compiled by Ostrovsky over a period of three weeks. The title of the retrospective is borrowed from her short film But Elsewhere Is Always Better, in which she looks back on her friendship with Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, reconnecting their life stories, blending places and times, and creating a new picture of Akerman's life context. But Elsewhere Is Always Better. Showcase Vivian Ostrovsky is organized by Stephan Ahrens, Petra Palmer, and Sissi Tax. The project was made possible with funding from the Hauptstadtkulturfond.