RekonGrodek

is the first in a series of experimental films about Austrian expressionist poet and pharmacist Georg Trakl, who died at 27 amidst the horrors of war in 1914. A pulsating soundtrack intensifies a maelstrom of images, suddenly accelerating, then interrupted. Images of love and pain flash past as in a trance: a face as a screaming landscape that appears and disappears in sequences combining archive footage with excerpts from stories. The Grodek of the title was the place in Ukraine where Trakl was stationed during World War I, when he was driven into an exceptionally severe depression by the misery surrounding him and attempted suicide. Initially he was unsuccessful, but shortly afterwards he died of a self-administered cocaine overdose in a hospital in Krakow. “Grodek” is also one of Trakl’s last poems, written in Krakow.