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
NAZA
NAZA is a codeword euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an airstrike. This chilling documentary exposes the policy and process of state-sanctioned mass killings.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem
Once Upon a Time in Harlem splices together footage shot by William Greaves in 1972 of a group of Harlem Renaissance luminaries in conversation at Duke Ellington’s townhouse. The film is a living archive of memory, disagreement, style, and Black genius.
Possible Love
Lee Chang-dong’s first film since Burning (2018) is a sardonic, slow-burning satire about two couples: a documentary filmmaker married to a wealthy businessman, and a working-class family struggling to make ends meet after the husband has been laid off.
House of Hope
"House of Hope" is the name of a Waldorf elementary school near Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank, founded by Manar and her husband Milad. This documentary follows their efforts to go about their lives before, during, and after the events of October 7.
Halloween Live! The Crypt Keepers + The Day of the Beast
Amp up your Halloween with a unique live set of holidays cuts from The Crypt Keepers, followed by Alex de la Iglesias's cult comic horror Day of the Beast, a wild ride about a sinful Catholic priest on the warpath against Satan.
Get Out
Guess who's coming to dinner? Daniel Kaluuya is the Black boyfriend justifiably anxious about meeting his white girlfriend's folks for the first time in Jordan Peele's satiric modern horror classic, one of a series curated by our VIFF+ Premium members.