The GSSN was delighted to hear about the ‘In Focus: Pia Frankenberg’ retrospective of the films of Pia Frankenberg, taking place 19–23 September 2025 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
Pia Frankenberg started writing and directing films soon after assisting on Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando (1981). Over the next eleven years, before leaving Germany for America and authoring novels, she made three features and two shorts. Her films are animated by contagiously impulsive women, most of whom abandon bourgeois happiness and instead pursue the romance of new, improvised futures. Frankenberg complements her characters’ irreverence towards social norms with wayward narrative arcs, and did not only write and direct these women. Often, she took to centre-screen too; her charming performances of fidgety, privileged women – who might go against the grain for less than radical reasons – wink at us with wry self-deprecation.
Born too late for the New German Cinema, and not quite committed enough to a feminist filmmaking project for Frauen und Film circles, Frankenberg did not fit into an aesthetic or political movement. However curious she was about politics and feminism, she was ambivalent about art that started from a fixed idea. She liked jazzy spontaneity; what was important to her was the spirit of the moment. As such, her ’80s comedies are capacious enough to accommodate both characters’ neuroses and the world, touching on issues including immigration, the housing crisis, and the long hold of ’68 on the popular imagination. While these films are set in Hamburg, her last film, Never Sleep Again (1992), wanders through reunified Berlin, as three friends ditch a late-summer wedding to amble along the indeterminate land opened up with the fall of the Wall.
Each film in this comprehensive retrospective of Frankenberg’s cinema screens in a 4K restoration, apart from The Assault (1983), which plays on an imported 35mm print. New writing on Frankenberg, commissioned for this focus, accompanies the screening of Never Sleep Again, and Frankenberg herself will be in conversation after the screening of Ain’t Nothin’ Without You.
For further details, please visit their website.
