THE ISTER

Year: 2004
USA: First Run Features / Icarus
UK: ICA Projects
Cast: Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler
Directors: David Barison, Daniel Ross
Country: Australia
USA & UK: 189 mins (part 1: 102 mins, part 2: 87 mins)
USA Release Date: 10 February 2006 (Limited Release - New York)
UK Release Date: 24 September 2004 (Limited Release - London)

US Distributor

Synopsis

A search for the foundations of Western Civilisation in the company of the celebrated philosophers Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler and filmmaker Hans - Jurgen Syberberg.

THE ISTER is a 3000km journey to the heart of Europe, from the mouth of the Danube river in Romania on the Black Sea, to its source in the German Black Forest inspired by a lecture course delivered by Martin Heidegger on Fredrich Hölderlin in Germany in 1942, the year the Nazis settled on the 'Final Solution'. The lecture course focused on a poem by Hölderlin: The Ister.

Marrying a sweeping philosophical narrative with a classic European pilgrimage, THE ISTER invites its audience to participate in some of the most provocative questions of contemporary philosophy. These questions - of home and place, culture and memory, of technology and ecology, of politics and war beckon us now as they did Heidegger in 1942.