AUT 2016, 21min
Originalformat: Super16
Sreeningformat:  HD-Digital
English with the Option of German Subtitles
Realised with Funding by stadt wien & bka

Concept & Camera: Josephine Ahnelt
Sound: Wolf-Maximilian Liebich
Editing: Manuel Stettner
With Jacque Fresco, Roxanne Meadows

WATCH Venus & Periphery online.

Screening Selection
12.10.2016 Cinema Next Filmnight, Gartenbaukino, Vienna
31.3.2017 Diagonale, Graz
27.4.2017 Bullets, Tokyo
8.5.2017 ethnocineca, Vienna
17.5.2017 Cinema Next Filmnight, Linz
17.10.2017 Arbeitswelten AK-Salzburg Awards, Salzburg

Diagonale Catalog:
According to Jacque Fresco, humanity must renounce its current value system in order to save itself: in his “Venus project”, Fresco drafts the utopia of an egalitarian, resource-based community. Sound and image recordings, for the most part asynchronously interwoven, herald the dream of a better world.

Cinema Next Catalog:
"The Venus Project" is a life-encompassing idea of a new value system for a more communal living. Josephine Ahnelt visits Jacque, the creator of the idea, in Florida and on the edge of his utopia already finds fellow campaigners for a better future.

Presstext by Claudia Siefen:
"The autodidactic social architect, industrial designer and inventor Jacque Fresco (born 1916) speaks of a reduced togetherness, of a language that is not dependent on interpretation. The basis of his lifewide idea, the "Venus Project", has been extensively and clearly outlined by him over the decades: he is concerned with the implementation of a new value system for a communal life on this planet. In his opinion, man has to be broken down to his basic needs. These basic needs (food, housing, protection) are the same for all people and therefore should be accessible to all humans in the same way. In this way, according to his theory, wars, abuses and poverty could be prevented from the roots. Man is just a simple pattern, a pattern of insignificance. And what is human, in his opinion, can only be regarded and perceived in the totality of all human beings. Because nothing comes solely from the inside of humans.

But wouldn't a language without interpretation deprive man of his most important and also most dangerous ability, of his creativity?

A long look into the camera and the screen is framed by camera fluff. The camera and the microphone can be found as a shadow on a wall again. The language and sounds are usually asynchronous to the assigned image and form a dense unit. Each person carries a name that accompanies him after his birth until his death. But most of this world makeup is not important, says Fresco. But in this he leaves out that there are no "humans“ as such. What does Fresco mean when he says that something is meaningless? In her film, Ahnelt smartly puts up resistance without being hostile: cutting the soundman's hair on an evening in the warmth of the night, the heaviness, a hug, and a hand reaching into the picture and into the hair. "Man" is palpable here in these scenes, along with his capacity for empathy. The camera is here to record this, and the director is here to present it us later. It is Ahnelt's pictures and sounds that show us that everything matters. And that the single human being is important. "