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Again - Live, 2019

live - performance

For IDFA on Stage Mario Pfeifer adapted his project Again (the film version also featured at the festival) to a live experience. It revolves around 21-year old Schabas Saleh Al-Aziz, who ended up being tied to a tree in Germany on May 21, 2016, after four men dragged him out of a supermarket and threw him to the ground. The action was triggered by the fact that Al-Aziz had repeatedly argued with a supermarket employee who sold him a defective phone card.

Background information reveals that Al-Aziz entered Germany half a year earlier, coming from Iraqi Kurdistan by way of the 4,000-kilometer "Balkan route." He came to the country hoping to get treatment for his epilepsy, but was abandoned by all the organisations that could have helped him.

Video screens above the stage also show interviews with court witnesses, and excerpts from news footage that provide the context of racial tensions in a neglected and depleted former East Germany. With every new fact we learn, different questions arise about the actions taken by the vigilantes. What would you do, and at what point does heroic intervention become street justice?

Five dutch citizens in the audience comment on the seen and heard live on camera before the lights go on and the general audience starts a debate on civil courage in our contemporary society and the systematic failures that lead to Schabas' death.

Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio
Mario Pfeifer, Again - Live, 2019, live - performance, approx. 50 min, photo: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio

live - Performance, approx. 50min

Commissioner and World Premiere: 32. International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam IDFA 2019
Project Website: www.aboutnow.info/again-live
Photos: Masha Osipova for Mario Pfeifer Studio

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Mario Pfeifer

Mario Pfeifer was born in 1981 in Dresden, Germany. His work explores representational structures and conventions in the medium of film, in locations ranging from Mumbai to California to the Western Sahara. Conceiving each project out of a specific cultural situation, he researches social-political backgrounds and weaves further cross-cultural art historical, filmic and political references into a richly layered practice, ranging from film and video installations to photographs and text installations. Often, Pfeifer collaborates on publications that reconsider these projects, offering research materials and critical investigations by writers and thinkers of related fields, concerning issues suggested in his projects for a wider social-political discussion. After his studies in Leipzig (HGB) and Berlin (UDK), Pfeifer graduates from Willem de Rooij's class at Städelschule Frankfurt in 2008. He is a Fulbright fellow in Los Angeles (California Institute of the Arts) in 2008/09. Further grants and projects lead him to Bangkok, Mumbai, Marrakesh, Beirut, Tierra del Fuego, Santiago de Chile, and New York. Mario participated in the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), the 11th Bienal do Mercosul (2017), the 3° Montevideo Bienal (2016) as well as the 4th Marrakesh Biennal (2012). Survey exhibitions took place in 2016 at the GfZK Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig and in 2019 at The Power Plant Toronto. In 2019 IDFA commissioned the first performance work AGAIN – Live which premiered at Amsterdam's Pakhuis de Zwijger. Pfeifer lives in Berlin and Dresden. In 2023 Pfeifer was awarded the Hessian Film- and Cinema award in the categorie "Best Short Film" for "Zelle 5 - Eine Rekonstruktion".



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