Fiktionsbescheinung Program 2: Ordnung

In the face of political pressure at home, Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Saless moved to Germany in the mid-seventies to continue his filmmaking career there. Yet despite critical acclaim and festival recognition, he remained a perpetual outsider figure in German cinema, a position also explored in typically unflinching fashion in 1980’s ORDNUNG (Order), albeit in transposed form. Aside from his Polish name, Herbert Sladowsky is German through and through, with seemingly everything one needs as such: wife, apartment, career, bourgeois friends. But something is wrong, something that will not be diagnosed or pathologised, but just shown in all its agony with patient, riveting focus, with a stillness that is as hard to bear as Sladowsky’s life. He hasn’t worked as a civil engineer for nearly two years, sits in the dark at home, bellows in the street in the morning to wake up the neighbours, frets about having fed a cigarette to a goat; even when with people, he is always alone. The despairing notes he writes are ultimately misread as poetry, but they are the clearest expression of his desire: “Let them say there is a man who sleeps and never wakes up.” (James Lattimer)