Retrospective: Anja Salomonowitz

Documentary, feature film, essay, portrait: Anja Salomonowitz moves between genres, finding a unique form and language for each of her stories. Her films translate themes such as memory, labor, and desire into distinct artistic forms. They tell stories of outsiders and artists, of personal experiences and the social structures that shape them. This retrospective—complemented by a small, personal “carte blanche” selection and an in-depth workshop discussion offering a first glimpse of her upcoming film—invites audiences to discover the connections, ruptures, and recurring motifs within a body of work that is as unconventional as it is versatile.

At the request of Anja Salomonowitz, each screening will be preceded by *There Is Exactly Enough Time* (*Es ist genau genug Zeit*, Oskar Salomonowitz/Virgil Widrich, Austria 2021, 2 min)—a film based on a flipbook begun by her son, Oskar, and completed by his father, Virgil Widrich.

Right in the Thick of It

Anja Salomonowitz makes films because she wants to learn something about the world. While this may sound simple at first, it is anything but; in her films, she is not content to merely depict this world—or, let us call it, “reality”—but instead seeks to discover what happens when it is reconstructed through the medium of film. Who is seen? Who speaks? How can something that vanishes within a supposedly “authentic” image be made visible? These questions run throughout the work of the filmmaker, author, and long-time educator (born 1976). Her practice constantly reinvents itself in terms of form, yet it remains rooted in the conviction that a deeper truth can reside within a deliberate construction.

In this sense, her work is also a matter of craft. She thinks in terms of colors, spaces, and compositions; she wants to understand how the individual elements of a film function and what emerges from their interplay. The spectrum of her work ranges from documentary essays, staged interviews, and portraits to feature films: in *Sleeping with a Tiger* (*Mit einem Tiger schlafen*), Birgit Minichmayr transforms into an “ageless” Maria Lassnig, while in *This Film Is a Gift* (*Dieser Film ist ein Geschenk*), an encounter with Daniel Spoerri and his art becomes the starting point for a reordering of memories.

In these works, the goal is not a straightforward reconstruction, but rather an exploration of what form a story actually requires. Salomonowitz is frequently told that her projects are too artistic, too difficult, or impossible to finance. She has learned to navigate these objections without compromising her own vision. Central to her filmmaking is a willingness to hold fast to an idea until she discovers a form in which it can truly function.

A retrospective marking her 50th birthday might seem unusual—after all, Salomonowitz is far from the end of her cinematic journey. “I think it’s nice to have something like this right in the middle of things,” she writes to me. And then, a sentence that casts the idea of ​​a retrospective in a different light: “I died in this life. Everything came to an end—right in the middle.” She is referring to the death of her son, Oskar. Afterward, she explains, she had to slowly relearn how to speak and move; filmmaking, by contrast, came back quickly and became vital. Perhaps this retrospective should be understood as a “looking back”—not as a final accounting, but as a retrospective gaze from a life that has, in the meantime, undergone a fundamental transformation.
(Florian Widegger)