Laibach: Volk - Dead in Trbovlje

WAT documentary about Laibach.

On the one side Vertigo Bird reveals completely personal attitude of Kovač toward the real ambience of his native town, while on the other the artistic articulations give his attitude broader connotations and develops it into a poetical structure of perception of the real world. Kovač places a group of dancers in this space of man’s activity, whose decline is a historical necessity.

Laibach North American Tour 2004 and Laibach live 13.12.2004 La Locomotive, Paris, France This Film is a unique document of the Laibach tour, during the traumatic post-election atmosphere in The USA, a country deeply divided by two opposite political and cultural poles. The tour has been therefore named "The Divided States of America Tour".

Laibach is a Slovenian avant-garde music group associated with industrial, martial, and neo-classical musical styles. They formed on June 1, 1980 in Trbovlje, Slovenia (then Yugoslavia). Laibach represents the music wing of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) art collective, of which it was a founding member in 1984. The name "Laibach" is the German name for Slovenia's capital city, Ljubljana.

VASHAVA is EN-KNAP film production team's way of saying goodbye to the Slovenian mining town of Trbovlje and, in terms of content, ends a 15-year-long reflection on the industrial era that left its mark on the valley. The international dance company EnKnapGroup enters the mining facilities for the last time before they disappear from the collective consciousness forever.

The destiny unites two homeless men in the S.O.S. canteen. A failed actor and lost poet begin telling each other the key events from their lives. After an extraordinary twist we become aware that the two men are popular and will participate in a film experiment on the Moon.

A complex landscape of improvised situations immersed in a perpetual network of mines under the Slovenian town of Trbovlje (Iztok Kovács' hometown and his main source of inspiration). The realistic imagery of this post-socialist city, which seems to still exist outside of time, has triggered the impulse of this introspective introspection by a team of renowned dancers and filmmakers. The physical tension and human flashes of seven bodies crashing into a deliberately chosen enclosed environment, surrounded by the unlit warmth and humidity of the underworld, inhabit and create the poetic mood of the film, echoing Tarkovsky and Beckett.

Intolerance in front of a released prisoner triggers a wave of violence. The innocent survive.