In partnership with Goethe-Institut the SIFF will present
Andres Veiel’s retrospective starting September 7th
The director Andres Veiel uses his creative energy working in different areas of art – he’s also a writer and a screenwriter, works for cinema and theatre. During the 80-s Veiel studied Psychology at the Free University of Berlin and attended the director's class of Krzysztof Kieślowski at the Independent Berlin Artist Center Künstlerhaus Bethanien - a place where other renowned International and European directors met such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Patrice Chéreau and Robert Wilson. Veiel's first documentary film “Winter Night's Dream” (“Winternachtstraum”) premiered in 1992 and was a result from his theatrical work with a group of senior actresses.
Andres Veiel reaffirms his position in documentary cinema with an intimate story - in 1996, the director shot “The Survivors”, picturing the fate of three of Veiel’s former schoolmates who committed suicide. In 2001, a large audience took notice of Veiel's documentary “Black Box BRD”, in which he is bringing the biographies of Alfred Herrhausen, chairman of the Deutsche Bank and his suspected assassin and Red Army Fraction (RAF) member Wolfgang Grams face to face. This film is included in the special retrospective at 25th Sofia Film Festival and it has won numerous awards, among others the European Film Award for best documentary, the German Film Award and the Santa Barbara Film Festival Insight Award.
Veiel’s next released work returned to the field of theater – “Addicted to Acting” (“Die Spielwütigen”) premiered at the Berlinale 2004 and portrays four Berlin based acting students during the period of almost seven years. In the next year 2005, the director worked on the documentary theater play “The Kick” (“Der Kick”) about the 2002 murder of a teenager by three neo-Nazi teenagers in East Germany. The play was first performed at theaters in Basel (Switzerland) and Berlin and was invited to the major German Theater Festival, the Berlin Theater Festival in May 2006.To date, the play has been performed by more than 60 theaters and has been translated into nine languages. Based on the performance of the play, Veiel created a documentary film which was first shown at the Berlinale 2006.
September 15th and 16th are the dates when two of Andres Veiel’s films - “Beuys” and “Ökozid” - will be presented IN PERSON by the director
in the Odeon Cinema and the audience is invited for special Q&A sessions after the screenings!
In February 2017, Veiel's cinema documentary “Beuys” celebrated its premiere at the competition of the Berlin International Film Festival. With “Beuys”, Veiel succeeds in bringing the first cinema documentary about Joseph Beuys, one of the most controversial artists of the 20th century, onto the big screen. During the three-year development period, Veiel conducted more than 60 interviews with contemporary witnesses of Beuys and viewed 400 hours of archival footage, went through 300 hours of audio footage and more than 20,000 photographs. The film consists of 90% of archival footage, many of which has been published for the first time. The talented German director uses the archival footage for “allowing the viewer to not only enter the time and space that the artwork was developed in, but experience its conception and creation alongside the artist himself.” The documentary “Beuys” offers viewers a psychological portrait of man, but also describes the way in which the artist seeks to reverse the effects of repressive social systems - and how his creative provocations continue to influence the artists today…
The audience of 25th Sofia Film Festival will also be able to see Andres Veiel’s latest film – “Ökozid” (2020). The plot takes the viewers to 2034, when the consequences of the climate catastrophe are dramatic. The topic of humanity's reckless policy towards the world economy, in which the idea of preserving and restoring natural resources is pushed to the background, will be relevant for many years to come until radical decisions are made to work for restoration of the global ecological balance...
25th Sofia InTernational Film Festival continues in September!
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Sofia International Film Festival is supported by Sofia Municipality
and is a part of the Calendar for Cultural events in Sofia.
Main co-organizers and partners are the Ministry of Culture, EA Bulgarian National Film Center and Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of EU.
Andres Veiel’s visit and presenting of his films’ retrospective
are organized in partnership with Goethe Institut - Bulgaria.
We’re waiting for you at the #CINEMAS * #25SofiaIFF