Canadian Premiere
In this highly original biopic, Birgit Minichmayr (Maren Ade’s Everyone Else) plays the renowned Austrian painter Maria Lassnig at all ages of the artist’s life, traversing the decades with nary a change in appearance. Unbound by conventional narrative form, the film skips freely between disparate times and places, recounting how Lassnig asserted herself as a female artist in the male-dominated art world of postwar Austria. Like the self-portraits for which she was best known, it is a daring experiment with identity, presenting a sensuous rush of emotion that transcends the limitations of a linear story.
Directed by Anja Salomonowitz, Sleeping With a Tiger is a formally innovative look at an uncompromising female artist, and a standout of this year’s Berlinale Forum. Mixing interviews, historical footage, scenes with actors, and fragments of short films directed by Lassnig herself, the film is a radical depiction of the painter’s inner and outer life, one that captures the enduring enigma of her art.
Birgit Minichmayr, Johanna Orsini, Lukas Watzl, Oskar Haag
Austria
2024
In German, English and French with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Producer
Antonin Svoboda
Screenwriter
Anja Salomonowitz
Cinematography
Jo Molitoris
Editor
Joana Scrinzi
Production Design
Andreas Ertl, Martin Reiter
Original Music
Bernhard Fleischmann
Anja Salomonowitz
Anja Salomonowitz has developed her own film language. Her films are explicitly political while expanding the boundaries and possibilities of film in their artistic form. She studied film in Vienna and Berlin under Ulrich Seidl and mentors students at Aalto University Helsinki and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Anja was chairwoman of the Austrian Documentary Film Association and the Austrian Film Directors’ Association, served on the supervisory board of the Austrian Film Fund, and is a dramaturge for the Austrian Screenplay Association. Currently based in Vienna, she is working on a film about Ukrainian activist and founder of the feminist group FEMEN, Inna Shevshenko.
Filmography: You Will Never Understand This (2003); It Happened Just Before (2006); Spain (2012); The 727 Days Without Karamo (2013); The Boy Will Be Circumcised (2016); This Movie Is a Gift (2019)
Photo by Heribert Corn
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Night Falls
An arrogant, womanizing sports star eventually gets his comeuppance in this jet-black crime drama from director Roberto Gavaldón.
The Blue Trail
77-year-old Tereza makes a break for the Brazilian jungle in this trippy septuagenarian fantasy, the latest from Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro is a quirky picaresque, lushly photographed and filled with mordant humour.
Agatha's Almanac
Shot over six years on vibrant 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac is an artful documentary portrait of filmmaker Amalie Atkin’s octogenarian aunt, who has fashioned herself an endearingly simple and self-sustaining lifestyle on her Manitoba farm.
Calle Málaga
Seventy-nine-year-old María Ángeles lives independently in Tangier's Spanish quarter. When her daughter pressures her into selling her apartment, she refuses to give in, finding in her old age a new resilience and an unexpected romantic connection.
The Art of Adventure
The unbelievable adventure story of how painter Robert Bateman and ecologist Bristol Foster drove a Land Rover from Africa to Australia in 1957, developing a love of nature to last a lifetime. An inspirational love letter to the adventure of life itself.
Follies
After two kids and 16 years of marriage, François and Julie decide to open up their relationship in a bid to rekindle their dwindling sex life. A painfully hilarious and brutally honest depiction of love, sex, and intimacy in the age of the internet.