Alisa Berger

Film

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Invisible People is an experimental documentary film dedicated to Japanese Butoh dance. It includes a series of film portraits of Butoh masters and performers, with a special focus on Butoh master Yoshito Ohno, the son of Butoh-founder Kazuo Ohno, who passed away during the shooting of the film. The film unites elements of Tatsumi Hijikata's poetic-philosophical texts on butoh, recounted life stories of various protagonists, and a mysterious search for the "Invisible People."

The film paints an intimate multi-layered portrait of a unique contemporary dance that moves in the gray areas between rebellion, eroticism, trance, ritual, meditation, prayer, ancestral experience, and physical anonymity. It slowly strays away from its main topic into a universal portrait of life itself in all its surrounding unpredictable strokes of fate and strange micro-connections.

Alisa Berger

Alisa Berger was born 1987 in Makhachkala (Republic of Dagestan, Russia) and raised in Lviv (Ukraine) and Essen (Germany). She studied film and fine arts at the Academy of Media Art Cologne (KHM) and at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Bogotá. With her 2017 KHM diploma film, she was nominated for the Max Ophüls Prize and for the FIRST STEPS Award of the Deutsche Filmakademie. She was also the recipient of the Best Film Award for New Directors at Int. Film Festival Uruguay and the Screenplay Award of H.W. Geißendörfer. 2018 - 2022 she lived in Tokyo and studied Butoh. Since 2022 she enrolled in the program of Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains, where she realized her new film INVISIBLE PEOPLE and received the Studio Collector Prize at Jeu de Paume, awarded by Isabelle & Jean-Conrad Lemaître and Haro Cumbusyan and the Analix Forever Prize, awarded by Barbara Polla (Galerie Analix Forever, Geneve/Paris) and Marta Ponsa (Jeu de Paume, Paris) for Invisible People.

Her work often deals with a search for the spiritual, non-rational drive in our world, cultures whose practices of knowledge acquisition are related to religious ideologies, mortuary cults or futuristic concepts of these believes.

Production

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