PANDORAS VERMÄCHTNIS

In the organizer's words:

A journey through the family universe of G. W. 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.
G. W. Pabst ranks alongside Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau as one of the greats of Weimar 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. 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, G. W. 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 G. W. Pabst's films and the couple's relationship: a field of tension between intimate soul mates, conflicts about parenthood, body images and eroticism, power and powerlessness, chauvinism and rebellion against it.

Press reviews:

"PANDORAS VERMÄCHTNIS is not a classic documentary biopic about an artistic personality, but in places is more like a cinematic family constellation and trauma processing. Although we learn a lot about GW Pabst, his life and his films, this does not form the center, the inner core of the film, but rather the question of how such a family legacy as that of GW Pabst and his wife Trude leaves traces over the generations - and that quite ambivalently in both good and bad ways."(kino-zeit.de)