THROWING THINGS UP IN THE AIR

Dublin. People who know me know what comes next.

Dublin is my second home. Dublin is my inspiration. As soon as the airplane comes into sight of Dublin's shores some button in my head is magically pressed and I need to write, write, write.

 

 This time I wasn't going there for the writing, I was there for real business and to ponder about my work life, my routines, my way of doing things, myself, basically.

I had a great first week, meeting super nice people at the "Filmmaking Essentials" course at Filmbase. It's located in Temple Bar, so I plunged into the city's musicbeertouristlight district right away. Each day we learned about another part of the filmmaking business: scriptwriting, directing, producing, camera and editing. And boy, the tutors were really good! Each day I went home thinking: what about me being a director? What about trying to write scripts once again? What about giving the whole production manager stessful job another shot, just because... you know, because it all sounded so good, so vibrant, so exciting.

 

 

A good friend of mine also invited me to his radio show Viewfinder on 103.2 Dublin City FM: listen to me here. I am talking about the differences between the German and Irish film industry, about my own work and anti-social work schedule. It was fun!

The week after the course I tried to meet as many people as possible - from the film industry, from a recruitment agency, I viewed a couple of apartments being shocked of the painfully high rents in the city and being astonished of the - in comparison - reasonable prices for buying an apartment.

I was very productive even without trying to be. This said: I never really sat down trying to "ponder" about all the above questions and still, slowly but surely my brainwires connected pieces of information and talks and readings and internet inspirations to some sort of understanding.

After a very successful afternoon spent in the Trinity College Library where I read most of my books in hyperspeed during my Erasmus year, more and more ideas had filled my notebook. And they were all sorts of ideas: old (refresh and really start my "Pay Me Fairly" campaign) and new (start a science/art gallery project, invent an app for dog owners, open up an Instagram account for finding and keeping independent cinemas all over the world: cinemakeeper) and they all had something in common. They weren't restricted by their nature of not being film, not being a translation project, simply put: They were allowed to be everything and as diverse as my interests are. I learned this:

I refuse to be specialised in one thing only. It's not about this one thing in life. It's not about either making films or being a writer. It's about having all these different projects high up in the air to see which one comes down first, which one can reach some higher point even and which ones make you happy and make you believe in your own abilities.

Thank you Cindy, Emma Donoghue and Miranda July for this realisation. I believe your contributions somehow triggered all of this.

Goodbye Dublin. I hope to see you soon.