Der Kongreß der Pinguine
Directed by
Where do dreams come from?
When they are restless, they come from tranquility.
When they are calm, they come from restlessness.
When they are cold, they come from the heat.
When they are hot, they come from the cold.
But always they bring you a message
from the distant provinces of your deepest self.
And if you still have understood nothing,
they already know everything.
Franz Hohler for The Congress of Penguins
In the dream he wakes up in an icy land that, at first, he cannot identify with Antarctica. He is cold, lonely, and frightened. He glimpses from a distance a procession slowly advancing toward him. As the thousands of figures approach, he realizes that they are penguins, thousands of penguins gathering for a convention. He joins them and, little by little, guesses what that congress means: the penguins are offended by the human race that is threatening their environment with filth and destruction. The response of the congress is the penguins' decision to launch an information campaign. The medium will be the nightmare, in the form of a dream, that humans have. The message is clear: people need to realize what is happening.
Over the course of the film our dreamer will work in three key places in Antarctica and South Georgia and learn to understand the language of penguins. He will talk with some scientists analyzing the past, with others analyzing the present. He visits a whaling station and understands the brutality of man in his ways of dealing with other creatures whenever he sees some chance for profit.
The film ends with the narrator waking up in his metropolis. Traffic, dust and smog of our industrialized world come through the window....
In-depth analysis
About the Movie The Congress of Penguins
Antarctica
The real meeting place of penguins is also the most imaginary place on Earth, where all animals can talk.
This place of dreams and nightmares is called Antarctica. A few dozen people live in this ice desert surrounded by turbulent seas, and they use highly sophisticated instruments to observe the disturbing changes in our world: the ozone hole, the greenhouse effect, the alterations in the climate. Also found at the northern end of Antarctica are the now-fallen bases of ancient predators where hundreds of thousands of whales, penguins and seals were slaughtered. A striking picture of our relationship with nature that seems to be based on insatiable, ruthless greed.
The film's success
The first screening of The Congress of Penguins took place at the Le Paris cinema in Zurich in November 1993, at the same time as the American film The Age of Innocence. The film continued to be shown in cinemas in Zurich, Bema and Basel for the next 15 weeks, beginning on December 3, 1993. The Congress of Penguins moved on to numerous other Swiss cities, large and small, and in Fall 1994 was held, in French, in a large number of cinemas in French-speaking Switzerland.
During the first weeks more than 75,000 people attended the Congress, a number that, for Switzerland, represents a phenomenal success. And wherever the film was shown, people flocked to watch the large birds depicted on the posters. Meanwhile, echoes of the success reached Germany, and in December 1994, German audiences had the opportunity to see the film in their cinemas. The premiere, in Munich, earned the penguins the MediaNet's first prize, and they also provided an opportunity to understand their urgent message to attentive audiences at the Berlin, Cambridge, Locarno and Munich film festivals. Now the English version of the film has also been completed by the Congress Secretariat.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Creative Europe Media Program. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.