Film selection

Warsaw, Nowy Theatre: 10-13 October
Gdańsk, ŁAŹNIA CCA, 19-21 October

Christoph Schlingensief was a versatile German artist – film, opera, radio and theatre director, talk show host, performer; total artist and uncompromising provocateur whose voice in the discussion about the cultural and political situation in Germany was important and made itself heard. Schlingensief started as experimental filmmaker and made his name with the “German Trilogy”: 100 Years of Adolf Hitler, The German Chainsaw Massacre and Terror 2000. His next important works were Foreigners out! Schlingensief's Container and production of Parsifal at the Bayreuth festival. The artist also cooperated with the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin – this collaboration continued until his death in 2010. In 2008 he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Schlingensief shared his struggle with illness and death in his journal Heaven Could Not Be as Beautiful as Here. In 2011 he posthumously won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial for the German national pavillion. During the first Schlingensief retrospective in Poland in 2012 the audience could see his film output, whereas this year's screenings in Warsaw and Gdansk will present his theatre and television works discussing politics and exclusion: unemployment, poverty, refugee crisis, disabilities. Schlingensief worked with difficult, distressing and uncomfortable subjects, and defied all conventions while getting to the bottom of the problem. He played an intellectual, witty and complex game with the spectator, sparkling with absurd humour, full of associations and references. He would often say that, just like his father, a pharmacist, he administers small doses of poison to the spectators, inORDER to cure them from the diseases of our times once and for all.

 

A shot from Animatograph