Part of A Supplementary Country Called Cinema
10.35 PM | The Halfmoon Files
2007 | Germany | Documentary | German, English, Hindi, Punjabi, Nepali (English Subtitles) | 87 min
Directed by Philip Scheffner
Mall Singh‘s crackling words are heard as he spoke them into a phonographic funnel on December 11, 1916 in the town of Wünsdorf, near Berlin. Ninety years later, Mall Singh is a number on an old shellac record in an archive – one amongst hundreds of voices of colonial soldiers of World War I. In his experimental search The Halfmoon Files, Philip Scheffner follows the traces of these voices to the origin of their recording. Like a memory game – which remains incomplete right until the end – he uncovers pictures and sounds that revive the ghosts of the past.
