Out of 46 submissions, the jury around art directors Chau Luong and Steffen Knöll as well as festival co-curator Josefa Marxhausen selected 16 posters by 16 designers to be displayed during the festival weekend at City Kino Wedding in Berlin. The material provided by the film makers served as content and inspiration for the design process. The resulting works invited the festival goers to reflect about the films’ substance and about their own expectations—before, inbetween, and after the screenings—creating an exciting interchange between the medium of poster and the medium of film.

The cinema lobby was packed with posters and people: In total, around 300 guests came to the screenings and collateral program on the festival weekend. Two feature films and a diverse program of shorts dealt with topics surrounding intersectional feminism, friendship, abuse, resistance, unionizing, empowerment, survival, origins, and deplacement—turned into thoughtful and original compositions by the designers.

Friday’s headliner House without Roof by German Kurdish film maker Soleen Yusef was represented by a poster from Ukrainian graphic designer Aliona Solomadina. The story follows three siblings returning to their home in Iraq to bury their mother. Without detracting from the seriousness of the matter, Aliona finds an honest and humane way to convey the physical and emotional journeys of the protagonists.

Rubber gloves: the uniform of “Las Kellys“, a group of housekeepers in Barcelona fighting for better working conditions in Organizar lo (Im)Posible by Tonina Matamalas and Carme Gomila. The entangled lines in the composition by Argentinian designer Sonia Bandura seem to reference the women’s bond, yet they dissolve, ravel, and separate—the same kind of complexity that the women in the film are facing in order to reach their dreams of a better future.

Film maker Alina Yklymova also deals with the struggle for a new life in her surrealistic piece LEV. A mother and her son leave the rubble of the Soviet Union to embark on a journey into the unknown. The letters L-E-V in the poster by Jasmina Begovic are distorted by the caleidoscopic surface of a crystal vase: a metaphorical approach to the characters’ inner worlds. Fleeing home, Lev, the son, shuts himself off of the outside world, while his mother Mascha is trapped by the pressure of being a beautiful woman and good mother.

Next to the printed posters, all of the 46 submissions were displayed via screen throughout the opening of the exhibition to display the variety of different visual languages and interpretations of the provided material. Flip through the gallery below to view all 16 shortlisted posters.

Myka Arnado
Suzanne Bakkum
Sonia Bandura
Jasmina Begovic
Joana Carneiro
Lisa Graber
Amanda Haas
Mado Klümper
Sara Moser
Alina Rybacka-Gruszczyńska
Gabriella Scarafiotti
Aliona Solomadina
Stien Stessens
Millie Tyler
Petra Valdimarsdóttir
Jess Zhang

Steffen Knöll, Studio Tillack-Knöll
Chau Luong, independent art director & image maker
Josefa Marxhausen, Co-curator Furora Film Festival

Svenja Prigge, Posterwomxn

Many thanks to Posterwomxn collaborator Josefa Marxhausen, to Chau Luong and Steffen Knöll for their curation, to Anne Lakeberg from City Kino Wedding for hosting and providing the beautiful space, to Laura Knoops and Nico Nitsche for helping with (dis)assembly, and to all contributors who submitted their work.