2000, 85 mins
Written and directed by Andrea Weiss and Wieland Speck
Producer: Greta Schiller
Narrated by Corin Redgrave as Klaus Mann
and Vanessa Redgrave as Erika Mann
Film showing and Q&A with Andrea Weiss
Wann: May 12th 2015, 6 - 8 pm
Wo: Schubertkino, Mehlplatz 2, 8010 Graz
Escape to Life, the result of a remarkable pairing between fiction and non-fiction filmmakers, depicts an even more remarkable relationship. Erika and Klaus Mann, the brilliant eldest children of German author Thomas Mann, claimed to be identical twins, despite being born more than a year apart and of different genders. Living under the shadow of Hitler’s rise, Erika and Klaus were intellectuals, homosexuals, and pacifists who lived as exiles. Erika was an actress whose satirical revues were censored throughout Europe. Klaus was a self-doubting writer whose banned novel, Mephisto, didn’t become a bestseller until long after his suicide. Filled with contradictions, their fascinating lives stand as a testament to the power of the individual — and art — against the forces of history. Weiss and Speck weave a seamless blend of dramatic scenes, compelling interviews, and amazing archival footage.
Andrea Weiss is an internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker and nonfiction author. She is the co-writer/director of Escape To Life, a feature documentary about the lives of Erika and Klaus Mann, which premiered in the Berlin and Rotterdam Film Festivals, followed by a wide European theatrical and television release. Her other film credits include Recall Florida, I Live At Ground Zero, Seed Of Sarah, Paris Was A Woman, A Bit Of Scarlet, Before Stonewall (for which she won an Emmy Award), Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women, and International Sweethearts Of Rhythm which premiered in the New York Film Festival. With her graduate students at the City College of New York, she produced the feature documentary, U.N. Fever, which premiered in the Global Peace Film Festival. Her company, Jezebel Productions, has been honored with retrospective screenings in Hamburg, Zurich and Berlin.
Andrea Weiss’ book Paris Was A Woman, on which her documentary film of the same name is based, was published by Harper Collins in 1995 and re-issued in 2013 by Counterpoint Press. It has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Korean, Croatian, and Japanese, and is the winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Vampires And Violets: Lesbians in Film (Penguin, 1993), continues to be excerpted widely in film studies and women studies textbooks, and has been published in translation in Germany and Slovenia. Her most recent book, In The Shadow Of The Magic Mountain: The Erika And Klaus Mann Story (University of Chicago Press, 2008), has been translated into German and Swedish, and is the winner of the Publishing Triangle Award.
Weiss has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She was Artist-in-Residence at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, and the D.A.A.D. Artist Program in Berlin. Since 2003, she is Professor of Film/Video at the City College of New York. Weiss holds a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University, which awarded her the Distinguished Alumni Award. She is also a recent Fulbright Scholar Award recipient, and will spend Spring 2015 in Barcelona, producing a documentary film on the historical memory movement in Spain.