Anja Kirschner (DE/GB) | Polly II – plan for a revolution in docklands

SYNOPSIS

Set in the not-so-distant future Polly II – part satirical sci-fi, part soap opera and Brechtian ‘Lehrstueck’ – portrays the lives of pirates and outcasts surviving in the flooded ruins of East London, a lawless zone set to become the latest in luxury waterside living according to government plans and venturing developers’ wet dreams.
The film imagines a future insurrection coloured by the legacy of dispossessed peasants, political radicals, whores, sailors, pirates, and former slaves whom once inhabited East London and fought a daily battle against their subjection to poverty, displacement and judicial terror.
Alluding to Polly (1728) - John Gay’s censored sequel to the popular Beggar’s Opera (1727), which resurrected the character of the robber Macheath in the disguise of the African pirate captain Morano (scheming to take revenge on a colony in the West Indies) – Polly II is populated by many of the characters made popular by Gay and Brecht. The film features the naïve and incorruptible Polly, the vengeful whore Jenny Diver, and the treacherous and the greedy Peachum – fencer, thief-taker and king of the beggars.

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

Anja Kirschner was born in Munich in 1977 and moved to the UK in 1995. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London with a 1st BA Hons in Fine Art Media in 2002 and also visited the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a guest-semester in 2000. She works across a number of disciplines – film, painting, drawing and music. Her films weave together documentary and historical texts, literary themes and popular genres like sci-fi and adventure.
A recurring theme is the conflict between law and outlaws, juxtaposing historical references and contemporary motifs. Her latest project Trail of the Spider, a western set in East London & Essex, made in collaboration with David Panos, is due to premier on May 30th 2008 at Tate Modern in London.

FILMOGRAPHY

• Trail of the Spider, 2008 (in collaboration with David Panos)
• Polly II – Plan for a Revolution in Docklands, 2006, 29'50"
• Supernumeraries, 2003, 20' 49"
• HotelHotel, 2002
• She really is the Devil, 2002
• Correspondence, 2000 (in collaboration with Farina Alam)
• Fragments of B., 1999