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TOTENTANZ  (Dance of Death)

A film produced, written and directed by Pablo Sigg

2023 / 93 min. / BW / German / Mexico - Switzerland

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After destroying each other in a cold August afternoon, the last two survivors of the Aryan colony founded by Friedrich Nietzsche's sister in the Paraguayan jungle meet again in an afterworld analogous to the world, where the struggle between master and servant, love and discord, day and night, darkness and light, still persists. 
 
A new film of the LAMALAND saga, a project made over the course of a decade in its real-life scenario and starring its living characters, Friedrich and Max Josef Schweikhart, direct descendants of the Nueva Germania colony in Paraguay, a utopian community first conceived by Richard Wagner and then founded in 1886 by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

World Premiere:
Viennale, Vienna International Film Festival 2023

Selection of presentations:
Havremagasinet, Boden, Sweden, 2023
Cinema Azzurro Scipioni, Rome, 2024

On TOTENTANZ:
« Two wordless old men, whose laboured existence simply goes on after death, and a toad tied to the leg of a chair that keeps trying in vain to free itself - not many film images come so close to the existential absurdity of Beckett's Endgame. » (Jan-Philipp Kohlmann, Der Standard) 
>> https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000192359/dokuessay-ueber-nietzsches-kleine-schwester-die-kolonisatorin

« Sigg’s efforts to shoot a feature in situ without a crew and with a cast of two aging brothers little more than skin and bone are astonishing, not least because if we are to believe what we see, they are connected to modernity only by means of an old transistor radio that plays distorted Beethoven and Schubert as if beamed from some lost Heimat far away. Nevertheless, the true power of the film lies elsewhere—beyond good and evil. » (Gerwin Tamsma)
>> https://www.viennale.at/de/film/totentanz

« In the contemplative life of Friedrich and Max Josef, which is thus placed in a post-mortem dimension, existence is shown in its minimal terms, opening up a question of meaning, where nature vibrates in unison with flesh and the ghosts of race seem like distant shadows. » (Lucrezia Ercolani, Il Manifesto)
>> https://ilmanifesto.it/totentanz-linizio-e-la-fine-nellutopia-di-forster-nietzsche

Links:
SWISSFILMS >> https://www.swissfilms.ch/en/movie/totentanz/415081A9B23B4A3895172EC21F26CC99
MUBI >> https://mubi.com/en/mx/films/dance-of-death-2023