November

In the 1980s, Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock, using the formal grammar of exploitation films. Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the leading role of a woman warrior dressed in leather and straddling a motorcycle. Later, this role more or less became Wolf's own political reality when she went to fight alongside the PKK in the Kurdish regions between Turkey and northern Iraq. She was killed in 1998 and is now honoured by Kurds as an "immortal revolutionary," and her portrait is displayed at demonstrations. Fact and fiction are intertwined in the global media discourse. Andrea Wolf's picture as a revolutionary pin-up would equally connect with either Asian genre cinema or a private video document. If October is the hour of revolution, November is the time of common sense that comes afterwards, though it is also the time of madness. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)