ifs-Begegnung mit »No Mercy«

In the organizer's words:

ON THE BIG SCREEN:
"No Mercy"

Documentary film, D / AT 2025, Director: Isa Willinger, Production: Ira Tondowski, Alex Tondowski, Sabine Gruber, Peter Drössler; 104 min, FSK 16

Followed by a film talk with director Isa Willinger

For her radical survey of revolutionary filmmaking by women, filmmaker Isa Willinger brings together some of the most important female* directors of our time: With Céline Sciamma, Alice Diop, Joey Soloway, Nina Menkes, Valie Export, Catherine Breillat and Virginie Despentes, groundbreaking female* filmmakers enter into a shared, intimate dialog for the first time - about their art, their anger, their vulnerability and the images that shape our world. Inspired by an observation by director Kira Muratova that women actually make the tougher films, they talk about sex and violence, humiliation and revenge, trauma and lust, tenderness and poetics and the much-discussed female gaze.

"NO MERCY seems like a necessary impulse in a debate that has still not gotten off the ground sufficiently, and at the same time manages not to serve the desire to look as a mere sideline, but to always convey its questions with relish - and at the same time to remind us of the existence of another cinema." (Kino-Zeit)

The film premiered at the Hamburg Film Festival in 2025.

Isa Willinger is an award-winning documentary film director. "Hi AI - Love Stories from the Future" was nominated for the German Film Award for Best Documentary and won the Max Ophüls Award. In 2020, Isa Willinger received the SI STAR Film Award for outstanding female directors. She won the Audience Award at the German Documentary Film Award for "Plastic Fantastic", among others.