The letters exchanged between the poets Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan form the basis for this intriguing exercise. The correspondence details their love, jealousy, passion and destruction over the 20-year period after they met in postwar Vienna.
Ruth Beckermann’s playful approach is simple but strikingly effective. She films two young actors, Anja Plaschg and Laurence Rupp, recording the missives in a sound studio. Gradually, the rich emotional content of the writing bleeds into the relationship between the pair, in an unexpectedly beguiling echo of the past.
