Invitation
This film a fairy tale for the generation, which has much of despaire and which only way to imagine the future is the hope, generation with no certain date of birth, but with certain circumstances of live. What can the trickster-magician, Dark Clouds of Apocalypses, Fish, Dead drummer, Muse-Leaving-Germany, Dice Roll and other minor rebel agencies (the protagonist of this movie) tell us about oursalves living in landscapes marked by ecological ruin, failed revolutions, and the unease of the present?
What we want to achieve with this film shaw is to open the discussion between the spectators and the authors of the film, who come to Mainz in the hope to find a place where unformal diolog between people, who this film was made for and who has made the film would be possible. Everybody is welcome to come and to participate.
Authors present: Tsaplya Olga Egorova, Dmitry Vilensky
About the film
Songs of Hope and Despair (2026) a new film by Chto Delat International directed by Tsaplya Olga Egorova is an improvised fairy tale and highly experimental road movie in which a group of strangely costumed, non-professional performers—Russian exiles and their friends—set out on an absurd quest for a miracle. Inspired by two key historical works, Werner Tübke’s Panorama of the Peasants’ War and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Niklashausen Journey, the film unfolds in the former mining town of Hettstedt as an unabashedly lo-fi magical game and tragicomic musical.
Oscillating between enchantment and exposure, mourning and play, the film asks a deceptively simple question: what does a miracle even look like in politically dire times like these? Drawing past and present into a single ritual procession, Songs of Hope and Despair reflects on manipulation and resistance, despair and stubborn hope, insisting—like all true fairy tales—on the fragile persistence of solidarity even when history seems trapped in cycles of defeat.
18:00 — Küfa
19:00– Beginning of the shaw
