Dreamt

Film Screening | 100 Years of Ingeborg Bahman

Information

• Language: German with Serbian subtitles
• Price: Free admission
• Part of the series: 100 Years of Ingeborg Bahman

Description

Love and hate, right and wrong words — these are the themes of the film Dreamt. At the center of this story are Ingeborg Bahman and Paul Celan, who met in postwar Vienna. Their correspondence forms the textual basis for this film.

A dramatic, intense, but endlessly tragic love story between Bahman and Celan begins in 1948, when she was 22 and he was 27, and ends with Celan's suicide in 1971 in Paris. For Ingeborg Bahman this was the great love of her life, yet she never stopped seeing him as a stranger and even felt somewhat afraid of him, as a Jew from Cernăuți whose parents had lost their lives in the Holocaust while she had not experienced anything similar. She loves him and reaches limits, both her own and his. Not everything in those letters is gentle. In a moment of doubt she asks him:

Are we only dreamt?

Two young actors, Anja Plašg and Lorens Rup, met in a sound studio to read excerpts from these letters. The emotions that oscillate dramatically in the letters — between intoxication and fear of loss, delight and horror, closeness and alienation — transfer to the actors as well. But they also have fun, argue, smoke, and talk about tattoos and music. Whether it is about then or now, about fiction or documentary, the heart of this film beats where these levels blend into each other.

Cast

• Anja Plašg
• Lorens Rup