Using unpublished and newly digitalised archive footage and film material, Bettina Böhler has brilliantly assembled this film about the life and work of the exceptional artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010.
Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz 1992-2017. The end of the GDR gave rise to new artistic freedoms in reunited Berlin. Shortly after the fall of the Wall, rebel director Frank Castorf was appointed artistic director of the Volksbühne. His way of working altered the public’s perception of this theater. The chronological history of the Castorf era between 1992 and 2017 is told here in excerpts from the productions and in a series of conversations conducted on the long sofa in the theater's foyer.
Documentation about Christoph Schlingensief's legendary election campaign. With his theater and art actions, as a filmmaker and opera director, Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) shaped cultural and political discourse in Germany over two decades. The party “Chance 2000” was Schlingensief's biggest, most public project up to that point. For the 1998 general election Schlingensief organized an “election campaign circus“ in Berlin and founded the party Chance2000. This is an ecstatic piece of political education and a tale of a party’s life and survival.
In the eight-part program U3000 (2000), broadcasted by the music station MTV, Schlingensief assumes the role of the presenter who hates himself for his self-love disguised as telegenic selflessness. Common broadcasting formats are all being ridiculed without exception. A socially needy family can qualify for participation by winning the always same outside bet, in order to make their private fate public in front of a running camera and in the presence of passengers in the moving subway. Childlike rounds of games give them the opportunity to improve social welfare, critically watched by a jury made up of the handicapped actors from Schlingensief's ensemble. Aged show stars like Maria and Margot Hellwig, Christian Anders or Roberto Blanco are used in a talk-show wagon as cheap fodder and are forced to show compassion with such victims of the market economy. The bands of the MTV generation (Atari Teenage Riot, Surrogat, Söhne Mannheims and others) play in the dance wagon.
Christoph Maria Schlingensief was a German theatre director, performance artist and filmmaker. Starting as an independent underground filmmaker, Schlingensief later staged productions for theatres and festivals, often accompanied by public controversies.
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