Forensic Truth Regimes

With Başak Ertür (Goldsmiths) and Alisa Lebow (University of Sussex) Discussion following a screening of the film Revision (GER 2012, dir. Philip Scheffner, production: Merle Kröger). 

The event is part of the series “Visual Truth Regimes,” organized by Laliv Melamed (Goethe University Frankfurt, TFM), Felix Trautmann (HBK Braunschweig / Institute for Social Research), and Franziska Wildt (Institute for Social Research).

What are we left with if a case is legally closed but open questions remain? What power does an appeal hold beyond the law? Aesthetic investigations offers the opportunity to revisit a case—even years later—to examine it differently and more closely, and to draw public attention more broadly to it.

Philip Scheffner’s Revision (2012) uses the tools of documentary film precisely for this purpose. Based on journalistic, as well as his own research, Scheffner examines the previously little-known case of Grigore Velcu and Eudache Calderar, who were killed at the German-Polish border in 1992 by a group of German hunters. The two undocumented Roma from Romania, who regularly crossed the border to work in Germany, were, according to the hunters’ testimony in court, mistaken for wild animals. Their subsequent acquittal continues to raise legal and social questions regarding accountability and justice to this day.

Together with Başak Ertür and Alisa Lebow, co-authors of the essay “Countering Forensic Violence: Philip Scheffner’s Revision,” (World Records, Vol. 9, “Just Evidence,” 2025), we will discuss documentary’s counter-forensic potential for a critique of legal processes, and the violence that remains.

Visual truth regimes are intersections of images, knowledge systems, and political (dis)orders. The event series is dedicated to visual, aesthetic, and artistic investigations of evidence—and how these take effect in the realms of law, the media, and in relation to forms of violence.