“The smart ones fight back.” It’s a motto that Lukas, the 15-year-old protagonist in the film Sun and Concrete (Sonne und Beton), quickly learns. Lukas and his friends, Gino, Julius and Sanchez, don’t fight without good reason. But in Gropiusstadt, the high-rise housing estate in the south of Neukölln, it’s hard to keep out of trouble. Things take a turn when Lukas gets a bloody nose, but that turns out to be the least of the boys’ problems. There are girls to impress and alcoholic fathers, drug dealers and police with bones to pick. The teens want to escape it all, but how can you when you’ve scarcely enough money to go swimming? Rarely has a German film portrayed growing up in social housing so honestly and with such humor. Following its world premiere at the Berlinale, Sun and Concrete is being released nationwide today. The film avoids the superficiality you see in lesser Tatort episodes and manages not to replicate Romain Gavras’s inner city drama “Athena”, a film which deals with many of the same themes. This freshness is thanks to the source material: Felix Lobrecht’s 2017 novel of the same name, which he adapted for the screen with director David Wnendt.

The film’s dialog is authentic, as are the locations. Lobrecht himself grew up in Gropiusstadt with a single father and two siblings. Today he fills stadiums as a stand-up comedian and co-hosts one of Germany’s most popular podcasts, talking openly about his Neukölln youth. Sun and Concrete is less about Lobrecht reckoning with his own childhood and more about shedding light on similar places that exist all over the country – where the kids wear Picaldi jeans, drink Cherry Coke at the kiosk and smoke weed in their bedrooms. The fact that the film strikes the right balance between social study and coming-of-age drama is down to the good casting – above all Levy Rico Arcos, who makes his cinema debut as Lukas. Jörg Hartmann puts in a strong performance as Lukas’ father, as does the excellent Franziska Wulf as Sanchez’s mother. They’re joined by many familiar faces from the Berlin rap scene, among them Lucio101, Juju, B-Tight and Luvre47, who provides the title song. Sun and Concrete is a film about youth, friendship, and a love (of sorts) for Gropiusstadt. This affection is confirmed in the credits, where everyone – from participants to extras – gets a credit. It’s as warming as when, well, the sun hits concrete…

Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: © Constantin Film Verleih

Sun and Concrete (Sonne und Beton) is released in cinemas today (02.03.2023)

@sonneundbeton

Ulysses Jenkins defies definition. Although the US artist started out in the 1970s working on videos and film – early enough to earn him the title of pioneer – he didn’t limit himself to the form. For more than 50 years, Jenkins’ work has encompassed painting, performance, music video, documentary and collage, and yet almost no one knows him. As a black artist from Los Angeles, he remained excluded from public discourse – a victim of American suspicion towards multimedia art. Without Your Interpretation, a new retrospective of Jenkins’ work at the Julia Stoschek Foundation (following shows at the ICA Philadelphia and the Hammer Museum) is, in a way, a new beginning. As the accompanying short documentary by JJ Anderson records, co-curators Meg Onli and Erin Christovale collected documents, archive material and films in direct exchange with Jenkins over four years. The result is a comprehensive exhibition that pursues media criticism in a very contemporary way. In “Two-Zone Transfer” (1978), Jenkins interprets two of the best-known stereotypes attributed to black men in the USA: the singer and the preacher.

Jenkins has always been concerned with how media representations affect the self-image of African-Americans. In video collages such as the 23-minute “Inconsequential Doggereal” (1981), he shapes them into a narrative of his own formed by identity, history and rituals. Jenkins’ works are in direct dialog with more recent artists like Arthur Jafa, Martine Syms and Kahlil Joseph, and direct our gaze to a hitherto unnoticed artistic cosmos: Los Angeles from the 1960s to the 1980s. A comprehensive interview, in which co-curator Meg Onli explains the relationship between pop culture and black culture, is also worth checking out.

Text: Hanna Komornitzyk / Photos: Alwin Lay / Credit: Ulysses Jenkins

Julia Stoschek Foundation Berlin, Leipziger Str.60, 10117 Berlin–Mitte; map 

Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation runs until 30.07.2023

@juliastoschekfoundation