Maria Pomiansky’s film “Glück (Happiness is a trip)” 2012, is the last film in the trilogy “Beauty” 2005, “Fears” 2009, a long-term study on the question of human conditions, longings and fears.
Maria Pomiansky was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union, immigrated to Israel as a teenager in the early 1990s and has now lived in Zurich for almost ten years. For her trilogy, which she began in 2005, Maria Pomiansky interviewed acquaintances and friends in these three cities about their attitudes to life, art, ecstasy, drugs, eternity and transience. Youth in Moscow, in Tel Aviv, in Zurich … The artist travels between the cities, finds what connects them, what is unique and what differs between the Middle East, Western and Eastern Europe. Russian, Hebrew, German and English are spoken. The filmmaker is the detached observer; a vague feeling of homelessness, confusion and melancholy suddenly resonates.
The artist leads her protagonists from light, playful chats to deeply moving existential conversations about life, combining composed images of faces and landscapes. The trilogy, written over a period of eight years, shows the change and development of the young friends. The autobiographically coloured film language moves between documentary, experimental and staged art film. In her film journey, Maria Pomiansky seeks answers to her very personal question of belonging. In its content and aesthetics, the film quotes and mixes the cinema of the Jewish diaspora, Russian and Soviet pathos and the pop culture of the West. Music plays an important role in all three films and, for Maria Pomiansky, is a link between the cultures in which she moves and which, in addition to many similarities, commonalities and the universality of human needs and fears, are also very different.
In addition to the screening of the new film “Glück (Happiness is a trip)”, Maria Pomiansky will be showing the other films in the trilogy in an installation at the message salon, including “Beauty – sunny from inside to outside”, which was first shown at the message salon on Rigiplatz in 2005.