Pink Schlemmer, 2025

Pink Schlemmer / 2025 / Running time 12:30min / Language: English, German / Subtitles: English / 2k / ProResHQ / 5.1 Surround sound

In 2024, a 16mm print of Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus choreographies turned up in a Toronto storage room; decades of decay had tinted it a vivid pink. The film follows that tint, and an agent — Schlemmer's flamboyant Indian-German grandson — into Schlemmer's modernist dream of the depersonalized body, stripped of gender, individuality, and history. Through hand-painted optical sound, archival photographs, and the intricate North Indian dance Kathak, Pink Schlemmer picks up the Bauhaus's tangled ties to Indian thought, and the ways performance carries over into its own translation — through media, memory, and material.

dancer Tanveer Alam / music Matt Smith / costume Laura Honsberger / mask Tim Manolo / production assistance Alex Turgeon / commissioned by Goethe Institut Toronto / curator Jutta Brendemühl

Festivals: Berlinale Forum Expanded, 2026