„A cine-essay exploring the fascinating relationship between taxonomy and monstrosity, A Demonstration covers a lot of ground in its 25 minute runtime. Featuring garish flashes of statues, leaves, books, nightclubs and libraries, A Demonstration demonstrates how Early Modern European science classified the monster alongside empirically observable phenomena“
Redmond Bacon for Directors Notes
„Russian director Sasha Litvintseva and Berlin-born Beny Wagner team up for this stunning, 25-minute long experimental piece that plays out like a poetic fever dream you won’t soon forget. Described by the filmmakers as “a monster film with no monsters”, A Demonstration explores the boundaries of interpretation and metamorphosis in an enticingly obtuse and evocative way.“
David Mouriquand for Exberliner
The strange and dreamlike documentary A Demonstration (Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner, Germany/ Netherlands/United Kingdom).
Laurence Boyce for Cineuropa
„We hope that our viewers approach the film without too many preconceived ideas of what a film should be and allow themselves to be guided by their intuition in a way that allows for new connections to be made between images, sounds and movement.”
So is it documentary or is it fiction? “We have difficulties defining the film’s genre. It was shot in the way one would shoot a documentary, in the sense that there was minimal alteration of the existing environments, and mostly involved observing things or people as they were. But it was edited in a very intuitive and playful way that didn’t at all correspond to the way things exist in space.“
Nick Cunningham for Business Doc Europe
Berlinale Shorts 