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Sleeping With a Tiger film image; woman lies back in chair

Sleeping With a Tiger

Mit einem Tiger schlafen

Panorama

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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.

Director
Cast

Birgit Minichmayr, Johanna Orsini, Lukas Watzl, Oskar Haag

Credits
Country of Origin

Austria

Year

2024

Language

In German, English and French with English subtitles

Film Contact
Links
18+
107 min
Art, Music & Photography Drama Experimental & Avant Garde Women Directors
Coop99 Filmproduktion

Book Tickets

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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 headshot; Sleeping With a Tiger director

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

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