S21.E15 ∙ Inferno

Oscar winning documentary director and Shakespearean actor Sir Antony Sher, both ex South Africans, investigate the murder in Cape Town of up-and-coming actor, Brett Goldin, and discover that 13 years after the arrival of democracy in South Africa, the country of their birth is suffering one of the highest murder rates in the world with 50 people a day being killed. What is going on in South Africa and is the rainbow nation which brought so much hope to the world just a few years ago, under threat?

Saluting the Sun are twelve continuous yoga postures and these movements have been used to tell a story that all is not what it appears to be.

Between 1996 and 2006 Michal Kosakowski produced 49 short movies on the subject of killing. 49 killings, dreamed up by inhabitants of the metropolis of morbidity - Vienna. In 1996, Kosakowski began to inquire into fantasies of killing - at first among his relatives and friends, then widening the circle to include artists, musicians and, eventually, actors. Within a decade, Kosakowski made 49 short movies, an essential element of which is the fact that these killing fantasies were put into practice with the complicity of the respondents themselves and depicted in the 49 videos. The collaborations between Kosakowski and his fictitious killers and victims in scripting, acting and staging the films could not have been closer or more intense. Michal Kosakowski himself was in charge of directing, camera, editing and special effects for all 49 films. The fantasies of violence, all of which seem to feed on the explicit violence omnipresent in film and television, are stunning. Not a single one of the 160 performers has a criminal record or was ever involved in any real acts of violence. And yet poisoning, torture, suicide, execution, ritual murder, violence by and against women, men, and children, murders motivated by sexual, political, and mental aberration come face to face with the recipients' emotions, naked and uncensored. The video-installation FORTYNINE is a 5x4x3 meter mirror-walled cube. Visitors who enter the cube are confronted by a 49-part HD split-screen that mirrors their reflections to infinity. The fact of interpersonal acts of violence, here anchored in present-day aesthetics, is also reflected in the emotions visible on the faces of the visitors, which are equally mirrored to infinity. 49 examples of fictitious killing collide head-on with the real emotions of the installation's visitors. The collective experience of any emotion generates intimacy - and it is precisely this intimacy that acts as a further constitutive component of FORTYNINE: the confrontation of the individual with itself, in the face of the most atrocious examples of violence. What Michal Kosakowski grants us is the rare occasion to experience a genuine taboo of our times and our Western society - death. A death that, for the time being, seems to present itself exclusively in the contemporary guise of the incessant violence staged by the media.

This film deals with topics of HIV Aids and rape, told from a unique perspective of a raped woman. In fact it is the female filmmaker herself who decided to go for this film starting a few days after the rape took place, knowing the film will end three months later, at the time when she can go for the final HIV Aids test. The realization of this film was possible only due to the immediate commitment of South African camera operators and many other South Africans who supported this no budget project. We would appreciate your time and effort for a film on a sensitive issue that is of so much relevant around the globe, without the restrictions of any boarders.