The Milan Protocol (Das Milan-Protokoll)

Peter Ott has directed, shot, and edited nearly a dozen narrative and documentary films over the past two decades. He is a graduate of the Visual Communications department at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg, and he remains a member of the Hamburg agitprop collective the Schwabinggrad Ballett. Although always grounded in questions of politics, his film work straddles documentary, avant-garde, and fictional genres. He gained wide recognition in Germany after the release of his 2007 documentary Übriggebliebene ausgereifte Haltungen, which offered a complex portrait of the Hamburg-based leftist punk band The Golden Lemons.

Since 2010, Ott has shifted his creative attention to the Middle East. After conceiving of The Milan Protocol‘s core narrative, he spent seven years assembling financing and crew to make the film, which was shot in Iraq, Syria, and Cologne. Before The Milan Protocol, Ott’s most recent film was The Presence of God in a Falsely Installed Contemporary (2014), a documentary examining the cultural impact of Hezbollah on the urban culture of Beirut.

Elisabeth Weber is a professor of German and Comparative literature. Her research interests and publications include French philosophy and theory; psychoanalysis and trauma studies; German Judaism of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries; and nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature. Her current research and teaching focuses on the ways in which literature and critical theory can contribute to an exploration of trauma, of human rights and their violations, and to a reflection on concepts whose definitions have become, in the contemporary context, more and more uncertain, including the concepts of “the human,” “democracy,” “justice,” and “rights.” Her recent publications include Speaking about Torture (co-edited with Julie Carlson, 2012); Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace (2013), and Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of U.S.-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare (2017).