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DER WILLE ZUR MACHT (The Will To Power)

A film written, produced and directed by Pablo Sigg
 
2013 / 61 min. / Colour & BW / German & Guarani / Mexico - Switzerland

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In February 1886, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, her husband Bernhard Förster and fourteen families of pure German stock left their homeland to found the Aryan colony of Nueva Germania in the middle of the Paraguayan jungle. More than a century later, the Schweikhart brothers are the last survivors of the Förster-Nietzsches’ racial experiment. Since childhood, Friedrich and Max Josef Schweikhart have lived their lives without any kind of social exchange, money or animal-source food; they have even practically stopped using language, leading a permanently isolated existence on the remote property in the jungle in which their grandparents originally settled. Today, as the last trace of the dream of Nueva Germania, the Schweikharts’ utopian existence only seems to take shape in the dark imaginaries of history.
 
World Premiere:
June 2013, Staatsschauspiel Dresden

Festival Premiere:
January 2014, International Film Festival Rotterdam
 
Selection of presentations:
New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, 2013
Cinémathèque Québécoise, Montreal, 2013
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, 2013
Ottaway Film Center, Bard College, NY, 2013
Lima Independiente Festival Internacional de Cine, 2014
Documentary Research Forum, University of the Arts London, 2014
Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2014
Havremagasinet, Boden, Sweden, 2016
36º Torino Film Festival, 2018

On DER WILLE ZUR MACHT: 
« Der Wille zur Macht stands out, however, not so much and not only for its identification of an apocalyptic and forgotten story, with an obviously pre-Nazi but also exquisitely positivist flavour, daughter of a time when social experiment seemed a rational prelude to a possible evolution of the human. The thing that makes Der Wille zur Macht a film of valuable experimentation is that, in showing us the Schweikhart brothers (who would certainly please Werner Herzog as well), Pablo Sigg makes a reflection on sign systems and their modes of representation. Which he uses, deliberately, in clear and peculiar ways. Everything that allows us to contextualise the images shown to us is in fact written on the screen: writing is, in Der Wille zur Macht, what allows us to discern history, the means without which we would not have the tools to give logical form to what we see. » (Elisa Battistini: Der Wille zur Macht di Pablo Sigg. Quinlan Rivista di Critica Cinematografica)
>> https://quinlan.it/2018/11/27/der-wille-zur-macht/

Links:
​MUBI >> https://mubi.com/en/mx/films/the-will-to-power