Bernhard Braunstein

Atelier de conversation

Bernhard Braunstein

Once a week in Paris a group of individuals from all corners of the world meet in a small room at Centre Pompidou to participate in free French lessons. Asylum seekers, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and students sit side-by-side and immerse themselves in polite, if stilted, conversation. However, tensions and misunderstandings occur as the nuances which each participant attempts to express become lost as they struggle to access the language. But despite their differences - and linguistic limitations - the disparate group of strangers in a foreign land find, in the small gestures and subtle looks between the words, a way towards understanding.

Sprechstunde

Bernhard Braunstein

The Benevolent Dictator

Albert Lichtblau, Martin Hasenöhrl

A Viennese Jew who left Austria in 1938 under the Kindertransport scheme, Norbert Abeles became a British colonial civil servant in Africa in the 1950s. Now in his nineties, he lives in Malawi, where he remarried, after working many years for organisations such as Unesco, but also African despots. The filmmakers film the present day, without recourse to archive material, and create a tension between the testimony of this previously abused child, who had to toughen up to survive, and images of his current life.