Vergeef me

Selling himself to the devil (he quotes Murnau’s Faust), Cyrus Frisch goes even further in Vergeef me on the path of controversy than in his previous work – this time in the ambitious form of a feature. He develops a dialectic between himself as provocateur, theatre-maker, scriptwriter of people’s lives and protagonist in his own film. He penetrates the lives of `outsiders’ he has come across in the street: the alcoholic Peter who visits prostitutes and his psychotic alcoholic ex-girlfriend Chiquita, her ex-boyfriend who is suffering from a rare disease, the wheelchair-bound heroin addict Achmed, a woman whose daughter has been killed by a junk and Astrid, who dreams of a career as a singer.Frisch started filming brutal scenes with these physically and/or mentally handicapped people, whose dignity is given away or taken away. When a first edited report screened at the IDFA only evoked positive reactions, he decided to carry on.Frisch provokes questions about the morality of (his) filming, and at the same time the morality of the viewer who is thrown back and forth between disgust and fascination for that disgust, but still keeps on looking.