Pandoras Vermächtnis

In the organizer's words:

• AT 2024
• 88 min
• Director: Angela Christlieb
• FSK: not specified
• Documentary: Original version with German voiceover and subtitles where applicable

Screenings:

• Thurs., April 10, 2025 - Wed., April 16, 2025 at 5:00 p.m.
• Thu, April 17, 2025 - Wed, April 23, 2025 at 5:00 p.m.

GW Pabst: Giant of early cinema, the "great unknown" - his visionary films, his multi-layered female characters and behind the scenes: his great love Trude Pabst, actress, author, visionary.

Images of women and men in radical change, 100 years ago and today, told from the perspective of Trude Pabst and her grandchildren. A film about dreams and traumas - and about why we are who we are.

A journey through the family universe of GW Pabst, the giant of early German cinema, told through the eyes of the woman who stood by his side artistically and privately throughout his life: Trude Pabst. A film about dreams and traumas and about why we are who we are.
Alongside Fritz Lang and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Georg Wilhelm Pabst is one of the "big three" of early cinema. His films question traditional values and show images of men and women undergoing radical change. They present a broad spectrum of new 'types of women' conceived against reactionary role definitions.

GW Pabst's private and artistic partner on this journey is Trude Pabst. She wrote down her dreams, thoughts and experiences on thousands of loose pages, which are shared with an audience for the first time in this film. Trude and Georg Wilhelm share a deep and extraordinary love. But as the father of a family, GW is a patriarch who wants to radically determine the course of his wife's life. The correspondence between them and Trude's diary, which is made public for the first time in the film, provides a deep and personal insight. In the letters, one senses the collision of norms in the 1920s, which is reflected in GW Pabst's films and the couple's relationship: a field of tension between intimate soulmates, conflicts about parenthood, body images and eroticism, power and powerlessness, chauvinism and rebellion against it.