"The films I make don't try to be naturalistic or imitate reality. They have their own." —Anja Salomonowitz
This retrospective presents the complete works of Austrian filmmaker Anja Salomonowitz, whose practice unfolds at the porous boundary between documentary and fiction. Across shorts and feature-length films, she has developed a rigorously controlled yet ethically charged cinematic language that interrogates how reality is represented and performed.
Over the past two decades, the films of Anja Salomonowitz have questioned how stories are told, who speaks, and under what conditions representation becomes possible. She often works with non-professional performers who reenact their own experiences in carefully staged settings, exposing the structures—social, institutional, and cinematic—that shape personal narratives. Her films are marked by precise mise-en-scène, frontal address, and an attention to speech and gesture that turns testimony into a form of performance. Rather than striving for transparency, she foregrounds the conditions under which stories are told, questioning authorship, agency, and power.
Now included in this retrospective is her most recent film Sleeping with a Tiger, which premiered at the 2024 Berlinale. The film revisits the life and legacy of Austrian painter Maria Lassnig with a hybrid biographical approach, through staged scenes and reflections on female authorship and artistic recognition in a predominantly male world. It extends Salomonowitz’s long-standing interest in how women’s bodies, voices, and histories are mediated.
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