Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) premieres Ancora un dialogo di Roma (2025), the first essay film by writer Katerina Poladjan and writer-director Henning Fritsch. Conceived as an “over-writing” of Marguerite Duras’s Il dialogo di Roma (1982), the film offers contemporary views of Rome while an off-screen voice reconstructs fragments of memory: an arrival in a indeterminate space of possibility and an imagined childhood in Ostia. As in Duras’s model, the narration retains the intimacy of lived experience; the images explore the city beyond postcard motifs, shifting between the beautiful and the uninhabitable, and unsettling simple oppositions of “own” and “other.”

Poladjan and Fritsch have collaborated across literature and theater since 2005 and were both Villa Massimo fellows in Rome in 2023/24. Their joint projects include the literary travelogue Hinter Sibirien (Rowohlt, 2016). Ancora un dialogo di Roma marks their first venture into film.

Discourse Program

Wednesday, October 1, 2025, 7 pm

Marguerite Duras, Il dialogo di Roma (1982)

Film screening and conversation with Katerina Poladjan, Henning Fritsch, and Jörn Schafaff (art historian, curator, and author, Berlin)

In German

Katerina Poladjan (*1971 in Moscow) has lived in Germany since 1979 and writes novels, essays, and plays. Her debut novel, In einer Nacht, woanders (2011), and Vielleicht Marseille (2015) were published by Rowohlt; Hier sind Löwen (2019) and Zukunftsmusik (2022) by S. Fischer. An adaptation of Zukunftsmusik will premiere at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater in January 2026. Poladjan has received numerous awards, including the German Literature Fund Grand Prize (2025); Trophée Littéraire des Nouvelles d’Arménie (2024); Rheingau Literaturpreis (2022); Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (2022); and the Nelly Sachs Prize (2021). She has been nominated for the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize (2022), the Leipzig Book Fair Prize (2022), and the German Book Prize (2019). Her new novel Goldstrand will be published in August 2025.

Henning Fritsch (*1972 in Kassel) is a director, author, and freelance editor. He studied German language and literature, theater studies, and philosophy in Cologne and Berlin. He worked as an assistant director at the Staatstheater Kassel, staged several off-theater productions, and founded the Sophiensæle Jugendbewegung in Berlin. He has been a guest lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts, the Literary Colloquium Berlin, and the Bavarian Academy of Writing in Munich.