Oyoyo

Through conversation, studying, dancing and music making Chetna Vora captures a community of students from Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Chile and Mongolia and other countries, living in the same halls of residence in East Berlin.

Gujarati filmmaker Chetna Vora only created two larger works in her sadly too short life. The first one was Oyoyo, like Frauen in Berlin, it’s an investigation into a specific group and sphere of life in the German Democratic Republic where Vora had studied film. 

While Frauen in Berlin offers a subtly more complex variation on a subject dear to the state and its functionaries, Oyoyo shows a group of  students from Global Majority countries who all live next door to each other in a dorm. Everybody feels a bit in a limbo. Everybody speaks a foreign language, and German with an accent. Everybody finds their place inside this diverse world of casual equality. Oyoyo is as much a document of a GDR that was, as it is a dream. IFFR presents the rarely screened longer version of Oyoyo in its recent digital restoration.

– Olaf Möller

Additional Credits

OYOYO, Chetna Vora, Film and Television Academy of the GDR, © 1980, digitisation and restoration of the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, supported by the Film Heritage Funding Programme, financed by BKM, Länder and FFA.

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