The young French from Mantes-la-Jolie call their everyday tours “Galera”, alluding to a strenuous life with obstacles. Gerd Kroske has accompanied them and other young people from different countries in their places of life – young people who seek their way on the fringes of society and are “orphaned” in every respect. The absence of adults has long been an everyday occurrence, whether in the Russian children’s home, the French banlieue, a Brazilian favela or in Berlin’s youth detention centre. The film questions the current media images of “Generation X”. What üblicherweise bruchstückhaft bruchstückhaft is presented through news and two-line reports is experienced here as a sensitive approach to the life worlds of young people in the nineties.Locations: St. Petersburg (Russia), Mantes-la-Jolie (France), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Berlin (Germany).
Prizes/Awards
“Lobby Filmfest” Frankfurt a. Main 1997: Audience Award IV Festival Int. de Cine Independiente de Barcelona/Spain 1997: Grand Prix
press commentaries
“We don’t do anything in particular, we never do the same,’ say the boys from Mantes-la-Jolie.
Sometimes you can’t do anything. Just sit around and be sad’, says Vasya, a resident of a Russian children’s hotel. Kroske manages not to compose social kitsch from this data material. He proceeds empirically, renounces dramaturgy and tension, only presents faces, situations and fragments of composition and music. Galera’ shows rap as a form of expression in which one can scold and complain, techno raves and disco parties as a social bracket, playing as a means of self-knowledge”. Barbara Heine, Berliner Zeitung, 26.03.1998
“The images from the margins of society contain an explosive Fülle of revealing details: observations of everyday life, forms of communication and expression, atmospheric sketches. Attentive viewers will find a wide field of interpretative Bezüge – from individual (poverty) biographies to (scandalous) political descriptions of the situation. But Kroske is a documentary purist. No commenting syllable structures his global snapshot, which listens with great patience to its interviewees, but does not penetrate deeper into them than they allow. The fragmentary character of the many fragments and individual scenes results from an attitude of respect, but makes analytical penetration difficult. The filmmaker does not pretend to have’understood’ the problems of Vasya, Mohammed, Cesar and all the others, but pays his position of the (participating) observer with a certain superficiality: “At first glance, much remains misunderstood. The’protagonists’ can only be vaguely identified and seem strange; in retrospect wünscht one would have gotten to know one or the other über a whole film length”.
Josef Lederle, Film Service, 18/1998
DVD Source: Absolut Medien, R2 DVD5 DVD Format: PAL DVD Audio: French, English, Portuguese AC3 2.0 Program: Program used to rip the DVD / Ripit, DVD2onex Menus: Removed Video: Untouched Audio: Untouched DVD extras: none
https://nitro.download/view/ACA26819A113CB6/1998_-_Galera_(Kroske).rar
Language(s):French, Portuguese, English
Subtitles:German (hardcoded), English (removable)
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