Paradies

For most of us it is difficult to escape the notion that the first results of creation were paradisiacal. But Pablo Sigg’s LAMALAND trilogy subjects this notion to a Nietzschean revaluation not without humour and reaches a fitting end with PARADIES—it’s not about Adam and Eve getting expelled from Eden, but how Cain and Abel are doomed to stay in the ruins of paradise. Shot single-handedly and single-mindedly on 35mm in the Paraguayan jungle, the films share a kinship with the absurd universe of Samuel Beckett, the subject of earlier work by Sigg. Yet the trilogy is equally a Dantesque reverie and an epic existential journey. Following TEIL 1 (SATAN), which saw the Schweikhart brothers, the last descendants of an Aryan colony founded by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, kill each other, and TEIL 2 (TOTENTANZ), in which they entered a dark, smoke-filled afterlife, this final chapter sees them emerge into an evanescent paradise. Turned into “a pair of clumsy demiurges” in the words of the filmmaker, they silently set about recreating the events from the first episodes of the trilogy on a miniature stage. Will recreation change the eventual outcome? (Gerwin Tamsma) 

In the presence of Pablo Sigg.

Pablo Sigg: 134 EXHIBITS (2009, K), WHAT AN EXCELLENT DAY FOR AN EXORCISM (2010), DER WILLE ZUR MACHT (2013), I, OF WHOM I KNOW NOTHING (2014), LAMALAND (TEIL 1) (2018), TOTENTANZ (2023)