Flowers for the Idiot

Flowers For The Idiot
Documentary / 105m / Canada
Dir. Malcolm James Rogge
​Tuesday October 21st, 12:30pm, $12
Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre, 357 Wilson St E

Synopsis

‍As a nationalist tide rises around the world, a flower artist who came of age in Hitler’s Berlin confronts her working-class family’s past and reveals its bitter secrets, confirming how essential, but also elusive, history’s lessons can be.

Reviews

‍“Flowers for the Idiot is a beautifully resolved engagement over Berlin's present and past; it is also a poetically curated work on memory and time." - Liliana Gómez, Professor of Art and Society at the University of Kassel / Kunsthochschule and the documenta Institut“As heartbreaking and powerful as it is tender and intimate, Flowers for the Idiot is as much a personal and a family story as a national and a global history. This film has an eerily terrifying twist.” - Xiaoqian Hu, University of Arizona“A truly moving and topical film that is important for all to see, especially younger generations. This remarkable story of a woman adapting to her fate speaks to those who seek to better recall and understand the human impact of World War II.” - Luise Drüke, German Scholar, Author, and former Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees “In the beauty of everyday storytelling, quite astonishing things unintentionally emerge - a truly interesting film with cinematic and creative flashes of today’s Berlin.” - Nicolas Whybrow, Author of Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin"Flowers for the Idiot offers a dialogue about what it means for an individual and a country to reckon with the legacy and trauma of past atrocities. This study of post-war reflection and memorialization exposes, through contrast, the work that must be undertaken in North America if we are to awaken from our present fog of innocence." - Man Ha Tse, Harvard Law School “A beautiful example of the power of documentary cinema, Flowers for the Idiot shows how conceptions of 1930s daily life in Berlin are shaped, both at the time and retrospectively, by contemporary politics.” - Ulrike Zitzlsperger, Professor of Languages, Culture and Visual Studies

Director

Malcolm Rogge is an international award-winning documentary filmmaker and legal scholar from Winnipeg, Canada. His acclaimed feature documentary film about a mining conflict in Ecuador, Under Rich Earth, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008, and went on to screen at leading international film festivals, capturing First Prize in the feature documentary competition at the Festival Internacional de Cine Invisible in Bilbao, Spain. Under Rich Earth was nominated for a Coral Award at the legendary Havana Film Festival in the category of best film about Latin America by a non-Latin American filmmaker. The film garnered several other awards and nominations, including Winner of the Global Conscience Award at the Mexico City International Documentary Film Festival; Winner of the Humanitarian Award at the Tiburon International Film Festival; Winner - Best Environmental Film at the We the Peoples Film Festival in London, UK; and Top Ten Favourite Canadian Films at the Vancouver International Film Festival. His most recent film, The Tribunal, premiered in New York City in October 2023 with remarks by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, and has been shown at the United Nations Headquarters in both Geneva and Vienna. The Tribunal has been celebrated at special screenings at Oxford University; Sciences Po, Paris; UCL London, New York City, Washington D.C., University of Toronto, and Quito, Ecuador.