“Die Geträumten” (The Dreamed Ones): Screening & Discussion
Image: Sixpackfilm
April 20, 2026 | 6:30 PM
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
Join us for a screening of Die Geträumten (The Dreamed Ones) by Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, presented as part of our series “Today” is an Impossible Word for Me: Bachmann at 100” honoring Austrian literary icon Ingeborg Bachmann. The evening will include a post-screening discussion on Bachmann’s life and legacy with Asma Abbas and Nick Pinkerton.
About the Film
Centered on the correspondence between Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and Romanian-born poet Paul Celan, Die Geträumten explores the emotional terrain of love, distance, and intellectual intimacy in postwar Vienna. Their letters, brought to life by actors in a recording studio, reveal a relationship shaped by longing, tension, and historical rupture. As past and present intertwine, the film captures how language, memory, and desire blur across time—placing Austrian literary history at its emotional and cultural core.
About the Speakers
Asma Abbas is Professor Emerita of Politics and Philosophy at Bard College, and Professor of Political Science and Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco. Her work traverses political theory, aesthetics, and postcolonial thought, with a sustained focus on the ethical and affective conditions of modern political life.She is the author of Liberalism and Human Suffering (2010) and Another Love: A Politics of the Unrequited (2018), and her current research explores the entanglements of violence, form, and sensibility across the ruins of the nation-state, with particular attention to the Middle East and South Asia. Abbas has taught widely and globally, including at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and through the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she has offered seminars on Ingeborg Bachmann, Assia Djebar, James Baldwin, and the poetics and aesthetics of the global postcolony. Her long engagement with Bachmann attends to questions of language, memory, and the premonitions and afterlives of catastrophe, particularly as they bear on love, refusal, and the limits of representation.
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based critic and writer focused on film and moving-image art. His work has appeared in leading publications including Artforum, Sight & Sound, and The Guardian. He is editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal and author of several monographs, including a study on Austrian director Ruth Beckermann. His screenplay for The Sweet East premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, and he is currently completing a critical biography of Jean Eustache.