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
Love
This warm, thoughtful piece offers shrewd comic observations on modern dating as it trains a quizzical eye on the trysts of a female doctor, Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig), and her colleague, a gay male nurse, Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen).
Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again
In the face of environmental destruction, two Nations fight to restore their river and a way of life.
Fairy Creek
Considered the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, the Fairy Creek blockade led to more than 1200 arrests. What Jen Muranetz's film gives us is the story from the front line from the activists' point of view (often, from the treetops).
The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival
If Art Deco had a face, it was surely Tamara De Lempicka, giving us the side-eye at the wheel of a green Bugati in her famous self-portrait. Rubio's invaluable doc teases out the truths behind the myths, shedding light on De Lempicka's still underrated art.
Image: © 2024 TAMARA DE LEMPICKA ESTATE, LLC ADAGP, PARIS ARS, NY