Measures of Men

Hadnet Tesfai is a radio and television presenter, podcaster and field reporter. She was a presenter on MTV and part of a team of presenters at ZDFKultur from 2012. Hadnet Tesfai regularly interviewed Hollywood stars such as Will Smith and Lady Gaga for ProSieben and has hosted the opening gala of the Berlinale film festival three times for 3Sat. In 2020, she launched the Instagram talk show “Sitzplatzreservierung” (Seat Reservation) together with her colleague Aminata Belli, as a reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement and the way it was handled in the German media. She hosted a conversation between authors nominated for the German Non-Fiction Award at the Humboldt Forum in 2021 and 2022. She also hosted the discourse “Inventur – Kolonialismus und Ethnologie im Pazifik” (Taking Stock – Colonialism and Ethnology in the Pacific) (2021) with historian Götz Aly, Ethnological Museum director Lars-Christian Koch and filmmaker Martin Maden at the Humboldt Forum.

Golda Ha-Eiros is a curator for the Namibian National Museum, responsible for the anthropological collection. She holds a postgrad degree in Conservation Heritage Management and Business Administration. In 2019, she was one of seven visiting scholars at the Ethnological Museum Berlin, where she researched the historical collection from Namibia and co-curated an exhibition on the collaborative research processe at the Humboldt Forum. As part of the collaborative project “Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures”, 23 cultural objects from the Berlin museum’s collection were returned to Namibia. Previously, Ha-Eiros was curator for the Heritage of the Liberation Struggle at the Namibian Ministry of Veterans Affairs and at the National Art Gallery of Namibia.

Girley Jazama was born in Namibia and has been working as an actress, screenwriter and producer for over 15 years. Her first appearance was in “The Ties that Bind” (2008), Namibia’s first self-produced television series, for which she was also part of the screenwriting team. In 2009, she played a schoolgirl in the German TV production “Liebe, Babys und der Zauber Afrikas” (Love, Babies and the Magic of Africa). Jazama co-produced and starred in the award-winning feature film “The White Line” (2019), which caused a sensation at several film festivals. She won the best actress award at the Garden Route International Film Festival and the Sotigui Awards in Burkina Faso for her role as Sylvia in “The White Line”. This role also earned Jazama a nomination for best actress in a leading role at the 2020 Africa Movie Academy Awards. The film also received a nomination at the 2020 Africa Movie Academy Awards and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards and the 79th Golden Globe Awards. Jazama served as co-producer and co-writer of “Baxu and The Giants”, which raises awareness about rhino poaching in Namibia. The short film was commissioned by the Legal Assistance Centre and funded by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (German Federal Society for International Cooperation – GIZ). “Baxu and the Giants” has been shown at festivals around the world and won awards at the San Francisco Independent Short Film Festival and the European Cinematography Awards. It is also the first Namibian film to be streamed worldwide on Netflix.

Lars Kraume graduated from the Berlin Film School DFFB in 1997 with his award-winning début “Dunckel”. Since then, he has worked on 30 television and feature film productions as writer, director or producer. Lars Kraume made his cinema debut in 2001 with the satirical comedy “Viktor Vogel – Commercial Man”. Various television projects followed, including the highly acclaimed “Tatort” episode “Wo ist Max Gravert?” (Where is Max Gravert) (2004) Kraume’s feature film “Keine Lieder über Liebe” (No Songs About Love), starring Florian Lukas, Jürgen Vogel and Heike Makatsch, premièred at the “Panorama” at the 2005 Berlinale film festival. His subsequent TV film “Guten Morgen, Herr Grothe” (Good Morning, Mr Grothe) (2006) was awarded the German Television Prize for best director and a Grimme Award in the fiction category, among others. In 2009, he directed the dystopian film “Die kommenden Tage” (The Coming Days) starring August Diehl, Daniel Brühl, Johanna Wokalek and Bernadette Heerwagen. Lars Kraume’s feature film “Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer” (The People vs. Fritz Bauer) premièred at the Locarno International Film Festival in summer 2015 and received numerous awards, including seven Lolas at the German Film Awards. Kraume’s next film “Familienfest” (Family Party) was released in 2015, with a strong cast including Lars Eidinger, Hannelore Elsner and Jördis Triebel in the
leading roles. He then filmed Ferdinand von Schirach’s play “Terror” as a spectacular live experiment for which he received the German Television Prize for best director. His next feature film “Das schweigende Klassenzimmer” (The Silent Classroom) premièred at the Berlinale film festival in 2017. In 2019, his drama series “Die neue Zeit” (A New Era) about the beginnings of the Bauhaus in Weimar was shown on ZDF. The romantic comedy “Die Heisenbergsche Unschärferelation der Liebe” (The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Love), starring Burghart Klaußner and Caroline Peters, has already been filmed.

Dr Julia Binter is a provenance researcher at the Central Archive of the Berlin State Museums. She studied cultural and social anthropology as well as theatre, film and media studies in Vienna, Paris, Brussels and Oxford. In 2017, she curated the exhibition “Der blinde Fleck” (The Blind Spot) at Kunsthalle Bremen. She is currently leading the collaborative project “Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures” on the historical collections from Namibia at the Ethnological Museum. Together with Golda Ha-Eiros, Julia Binter curated the exhibition on the collaborative project at the Humboldt Forum.

Larissa Förster is a professor at the Institute for European Ethnology and a member of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at Humboldt University Berlin. She is a cultural and social anthropologist with a regional focus on Southern Africa and a thematic focus on post-colonial provenance/restitution research, especially with regard to human remains (including those from Namibia). She has been providing the project “Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures” with support. She has also been head of the “Department for Cultural Goods and Collections from Colonial Contexts” at the German Lost Art Foundation since 2019.