AHNEN ahnen

Directed by Pina Bausch

While Pina Bausch was preparing her film The Plaint of the Empress in 1987, the French, British and German co-producers were waiting for a script. No script: no film. That is how the film industry saw things.The discussions dragged on but eventually the TV stations accepted the idea of shooting the film without a script. Someone had the idea of making a "test film" showing what the results of working in Pina Bausch's way could be. That's how this film was born - a documentary on the rehearsals for AHNEN, a piece she was developing at the time. For twenty five years the film stayed in the archives; today it emerges as an extraordinary document. This is how Pina Bausch and her company worked. This is how this work was created, that touched so many people continous to do so today.