Peggy Anne Berton grew up on a farm in the Canadian province of Ontario and saw more and more of her land disappear in the name of progress. The loss of the familiarity of one’s own home and the psychological consequences thereof are topics dealt with in her performance ScareCity. What happens when the earth is covered with cement, shopping malls and highways? An experimental filmmaker, Berton has been working as a video artist since the 1980s. She combines the coarse-grained quality of Super 8 films with improvised, at times equally coarse prose and music. Berton takes random shots of a world whose appearance is changing: trivial snapshots of people, streets and houses, an unstaged portrayal of life that she allows to find its way into the story without actually telling the story herself. Her prophesy is: “If you violate Mother Nature, she’ll take her revenge-and all your science won’t save you!” Her improvised monologue accompanies the film; she tells short anecdotes, formulates her thoughts and speaks to herself as well as to the audience. She is assisted by the Canadian multimedia artist Marc St Aubin. He has composed music for each scene, which is either played live during the performance or taken from the hard disk, with a mix of acoustic and electric sound sources. In keeping with the main focus of the Hamburg Film Festival, “Diversity and Unity”, Peggy Anne Berton, together with Marc St Aubin, dismantles the concepts and components of cinema, putting them back together as a new whole like a collage. Dialogue, music and images are separated from one another and appear as independent artistic elements which, in the course of the performance, influence each other, play around with each other and are interdependent. This deconstructivist approach creates gaps and spaces in the narrative flow, which the audience fills with its own thoughts and interpretations. The personal impressions and memories of the audience thus become part of the film. ScareCity is a free, allegorical narrative about the present. The expansionary urge of the energy-guzzling North American economy ignores energy crises and spoils agriculture, poisoning the once fruitful soil with pesticides. “We have forgotten what we remember,” Berton says. Her accusation is a powerful testimony of being uprooted in one’s own country: as if people were literally having the ground cut from under their feet.
   
Hadley’s Caf� Bar, Beim Schlump 84a, tel.: 4 50 50 75
admission free - advance booking recommended