Das Hamlet-Syndrom

Filmstill The Hamlet Syndrome

The Hamlet Syndrome

Das Hamlet-Syndrom
Elwira Niewiera, Piotr Rosołowski
Competition for the Audience Award 2022
Documentary Film
Germany,
Poland
2022
85 minutes
Ukrainian,
Russian
subtitles: 
English

Five young people from Ukraine talk about their lives after the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Not all of them fought in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the war, however, shattered their life plans. Representing “Generation Maidan”, they face the question of how to cope with experiences of violence, how to go on. Theatre director Roza Sarkisian produces a Hamlet adaptation with them in which they can use Shakespeare’s tragic character as a mirror and face their traumas on stage again.

For them Hamlet’s question “to be or not to be” is not just a historical text, but a current and existential dilemma that has no clear answer. The film follows the rehearsals where different biographies, self-images and political positions clash: A soldier meets his first LGBT person, the feminist quarrels with the fact that the war has undone hard-won emancipatory achievements. Frictions and differences are exposed, compromises are strenuously negotiated. Eventually the film’s focus widens and leaves the stage to introduce the five as individuals with their own inner struggles. The result is a many-layered, dense portrait of a torn and yet powerful Ukrainian generation who, due to the Russian invasion, find themselves at war again, only a few months after their production premiered.
Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Elwira Niewiera
Piotr Rosołowski
Andreas Banz
Matthias Miegel
Magdalena Kaminska
Agata Szymanska
Robert Thalheim
Katarzyna Wilk
Eva Witte-Toetzke
Beata Ryczkowska
Alicja Gancarz
Eva Witte-Toetzke
Agata Ciernak
Jonathan Schorr
Piotr Rosołowski
John Gürtler
Jan Miserre
Marcin Lenarczyk
Jaroslaw Sadowski
Andrii Nidzelskyi
Nominated for MDR Film Prize, Leipziger Ring
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War and Conflict
Ukraine
Depth of Souls