Film
Three short films explore the inner turmoil—ranging from psychosis to memory loss—of teen residents of a psychiatric hospital.
Awards: Golden Spire Award, San Francisco International Film Festival 1997, Eastman Kodak Award, Windy City Documentary Film Festival, 1997
Based on a text by Paul Celan. Short film, 16mm color, Austria, 1999. A film about surviving the Holocaust in hostile territory.
This film retells the story “Conversation in the Mountains” by the writer Paul Celan (1920–1970). The viewer is guided through the short text that Celan wrote in 1959 after a failed attempt to meet the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno in the Engadine. Two Jews, Small and Large, meet after the war in the unfamiliar mountains of their homeland. But they cannot find each other in the dark language of the night and return to their own fates. Survivors join the dead and together look forward to a new day.
French subtitles version here.
Co-produced with Lucia Schrenk, Roland Hablesreiter – Transmitter Film.
Redemption Blues, a film about the onerous legacy of the Holocaust, begins where conventional Shoah narratives leave off and traces a path forward, exploring redemption through the second generation’s point of view. At a time when the last members of the survivor generation are bidding us farewell, and historical witnessing cannot endure, Redemption Blues engages with emotional and political vestiges that are yet to be resolved.
The film is presented as an artistic reckoning and a deeply personal journey into the future of living with the legacy of the Holocaust. The perspectives of survivors and the guiding narrative of the filmmaker are woven into a stream of music that runs from nostalgia and religious sources into an ocean of free, improvisational creation. Could this be a way forward, given the many spiritual and political fallacies?
Co-directed with Lisa Rinzler, Portraits of individuals residing in adult homes near the Coney Island boardwalk. 15 minutes, digital video.
Peter Stastny 