film
Angelo
directed by Markus Schleinzer, Austria/Luxembourg 2018, 111'
Schleinzer’s film tells a true and fascinating story of Angelo Soliman, an African slave brought as a boy into a house of a Venetian aristocrat, who then lives among the high society of 18th-century Vienna. For the next high-ranking caregivers and employers, Angelo’s life is a field of social and educational experiments, and his body is the subject of meticulous “scientific” research. This visually stunning, daringly acted, provocative film is a brilliant analysis of the mechanisms of colonisation, which are to blame for Angelo not being treated as a human, but as a blank slate to be written on or as a foreign land without an identity – waiting to be conquered.
