We caught up with Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, whose body of work has long explored memory, history and the shifting terrain of identity, to speak about Wax & Gold [+see also:
film review
interview: Ruth Beckermann
film profile], world-premiering in Berlinale's Berlinale Special section. Inspired in part by Ryszard Kapuściński’s book The Emperor, Beckermann constructs an essay film around the Hilton Addis Ababa, built under Emperor Haile Selassie in the 1960s, making it a stage on which past and present and European gaze and Ethiopian self-perception intersect. Beckermann discusses her film, which weaves archival footage, contemporary encounters and the her own reflections into a layered meditation on historical truth and its contradictions.