Redemption Blues

Film screening and discussion with Peter Stastny and Paola Mieli (Après-coup Psychoanalytic Association)

Redemption Blues (2017). By Peter Stastny. Produced by Peter Stastny, Lucia Schrenk, Roland Hablesreiter – Transmitter Film

Redemption Blues, a film about the onerous legacy of the Holocaust, begins where conventional Shoah narratives leave off and traces a path forward, exploring redemption through the second generation’s point of view. At a time when the last members of the survivor generation are bidding us farewell, and historical witnessing cannot endure, Redemption Blues engages with emotional and political vestiges that are yet to be resolved.

The film is presented as an artistic reckoning and a deeply personal journey into the future of living with the legacy of the Holocaust. The perspectives of survivors and the guiding narrative of the filmmaker are woven into a stream of music that runs from nostalgia and religious sources into an ocean of free, improvisational creation. Could this be a way forward, given the many spiritual and political fallacies?

Peter Stastny is a filmmaker and psychiatrist living in New York and Vienna. His film work began as an impulse to document the pioneering accomplishments of former psychiatric patients and activists, Nerve (1995), followed by several collaborations with current and former patients, In the House (1996) and Coney Island (2003). Since 1999 he has also addressed the consequences of the Shoah in experimental documentary fashion, including Conversation in the Mountains (1999) based on a story by Paul Celan; Munkacs 60-year Reunion (2005) and most recently, Redemption Blues (2018).

Paola Mieli  is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She is the president Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association (New York) and a member of Le Cercle Freudien (Paris) and of The European Federation of Psychoanalysis (Strasbourg). She is a contributing editor of the Journal Insistance: Art, psychanalyse et politique (Paris) and associate researcher at the Centre de Recherches en Psychanalyse, Medicine et Société at the University of Paris VII. Dr. Mieli is the author of numerous articles on psychoanalysis and on culture. Her books include: Sobre as manipulaçaões irreversívels do corpo ( Rio de Janeiro 2002), and Being Human: The Technological Extensions of the Body (Co-Editor, New York, 1999). She is the Publisher and Director of Sea Horse Imprint (New York), Silver Martian: Normality and Segregation in Primo Levi’s Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge (CPL Editions, NY 2014).