Anka und Wilhelm Sasnal
Aleksander

On the occasion of the exhibition Real Emotions: Thinking in Film, KW Institute for Contemporary Art is glad to present the German premier of Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal's film Aleksander (2013).

Following the film's screening, the filmmakers will be joined by film scholar Volker Pantenburg for a discussion. Their talk will discuss Aleksander and Sasnal's other films in light of the exhibition's key questions: How is "truth" constructed in film? What is documentary and what is forever constructed, as events and characters are made into films? What is the camera's role and how does it form relationships? And finally, what power lies in the specific medium of film, that it can construct personal and collective experiences, our perception of reality, and even our role in it.

Anka Sasnal about Aleksander:
Thirty minutes is all it takes to get to the village from our house. 40 kilometres. At first, it was a long journey to a place where chaos reigns even though the days pass quietly; where people don't have work even though they're always busy with something, and nothing ever changes. We had been making that journey for two years. We filmed a diary of these trips. it wasn't done on a regular basis, but we wanted to describe the life of the people we met there, arrange their reality somehow. We had a plan, with clear-cut roles for ourselves and them, and a camera we could hide behind. One day, it turned out that the camera no longer separated us, that our heroes stopped noticing it. And then we got so close that we couldn't help but succumb to this reality. this film is about us, too.
www.aleksanderfilm.com

Volker Pantenburg is a junior professor in image theorie, with focus on the moving image, at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. His research focuses on the cinematographic object, concepts of space and landscape in cinema, the history of experimental film, and "migrational aesthetics": between cinema and the museum.

The event is supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.