Sibylle Canonica

Dr. Ruth Wolff is a celebrated doctor and agnostic Jew. When she refuses a Catholic priest access to a young patient in a terminal condition, the incident soon has major repercussions and Ruth finds herself at the centre of a media shitstorm that threatens her entire way of life.

The writer and director Robert Icke has transposed Arthur Schnitzler’s play «Professor Bernhardi» (1912) vividly into the present. The «Times» of London described «The Doctor» as being «as slippery, muscular and complex as a human heart, more intricate the deeper his dissection goes.»

In her autobiographical memoir «A Girl’s Story», published in 2016, the French writer Annie Ernaux attempts to understand a deeply formative experience in her own life. What happened to her, a young woman aged 18 at the time, in the summer of 1958? Between fragments of memories, diary entries, letters and decades-old photos, the author undertakes an almost forensic analysis of what happened, its effects and the social frameworks and sexual double standards that grant or refuse entirely different forms of «freedom» to men and women respectively. «A Girl’s Story» shows an almost 80-year-old woman painfully confronting sexual shame, impotence and self-empowerment and is – shortly before the #MeToo movement arose – a touching and highly political document of putting an end to silence.

In «Gesichter» taucht die für ihre «Kopenhagen-Trilogie» gefeierte Autorin mit einer fesselnden Kombination aus bildhafter, expressiver und surrealer Sprache so tief in die verzerrte Wahrnehmungswelt der Hauptfigur Lise Mundus ein, dass es beinahe schmerzhaft wird.