Partnering with Goethe Institut, CAB presents a retrospective celebrating two influential figures in Film-making from Sri Lanka and Germany.
Christoph Schlingensief (1960-2010) was a universal artist; a film, theater, and opera director; action and fine artist; author and TV-host. The bounderies between his works were fluid, one developed out of the other. He can be considered one of the most influential figures in the German art world since Joseph Beuys. The screenings will take you through a cross-section of his films since 1982.
Starting with Für Elise, an early 16mm short-film, which is followed by the documentary Christoph Schlingensief and His Films for those who are completely unfamiliar with his work. My Wife in Five is a poetic short-film of three music video clips. Egomania featuring Tilda Swinton and Udo Kier is a definite end-of-the-world scenario. Next The German Chainsaw Massacre is a horror-trash movie with a serious political background though, the unification of Eastern and Western Germany – the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990 after the end of the Cold War. Closing with a film that questions “What is normal? Is it us or the so-called retarded?”, Freakstars 3000 is a parody of casting shows like the American Idol.
Vimukthi Jayasundara’s films can never be entirely defined by their plots. Encouraging each viewer to meet him partway, he crafts his narratives as a series of questions and his characters as open forms. He was the first Sri Lankan to win the prestigious Cannes Film Festival Camera d’Or in 2005
“The Land of Silence” is a short film essay in black and white describing the victims of a civil war that has been going on for the past fifteen years in Sri Lanka. In the context of a no-war-no-peace quagmire, “Empty for Love” deals with day to day life weighed down by an oppressive feeling of insecurity. “Between Two Worlds”, “Mushrooms” and ”Forsaken Land” are worksthat speaks from the borders: those that separate a country from another, modern cities from ancestral land, and the threshold between the living and the dead. And from there, it erases the borders between fiction and documentary, between cinema and visual arts.
All of this viewable for free from 16 – 19 February 2012 at the Goethe Institut.