Sleeping with a Tiger
A film by Anja Salomonowitz
Fragments of a life in colour.
Studio spaces, painted bodies, private gestures and public encounters form a visual language in which memory and sensation refuse to stay in a single time.
A portrait of an artist who refused to fit the frame.
Maria Lassnig searches for a visual language capable of expressing what the body feels from within.
Sleeping with a Tiger is a poetic portrait of Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, following a life shaped by artistic conviction, isolation, struggle and the long search for a personal form of expression.
Rather than moving through a conventional biographical timeline, the film lets memory and sensation coexist. Birgit Minichmayr embodies Lassnig at every age, creating an intimate inner portrait of an artist confronting a male-dominated art world while remaining uncompromisingly committed to her work.
One Maria Lassnig.
Outside ordinary time.
Birgit Minichmayr plays Maria Lassnig as a child, a young artist, an established painter and an elderly woman without conventional ageing make-up. The same face moves across decades, turning biography into an interior landscape of memory, feeling and artistic persistence.
Painting the body from the inside out.
Maria Lassnig was an Austrian painter whose work developed around an intense awareness of bodily sensation. Her “body-consciousness painting” transformed pressure, pain, absence and physical feeling into colour and form.
Across decades she fought marginalization in a male-dominated art world while building an uncompromising practice of remarkable independence. In 1980 she became the first woman in the German-speaking world to hold a professorship in painting; in 2013 she received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.
Anja Salomonowitz
A filmmaker whose work moves between documentary, fiction and artistic intervention.
Salomonowitz has developed a distinctive film language in which real experiences are transformed through formal, often highly controlled artistic concepts. Her films are explicitly political while expanding the possibilities of cinematic form.
For Sleeping with a Tiger, the starting point was Lassnig’s paintings themselves: their colours, inner tension and emotional force. The result is not a conventional reconstruction of a life, but a film that searches for its own equivalent to the painter’s way of sensing the world.
Courtesy of sixpackfilm
Austrian cinema on the big screen in Calgary.
Join us at La Cité des Rocheuses for Sleeping with a Tiger, Anja Salomonowitz’s unconventional portrait of Maria Lassnig. The 107-minute feature begins at 8:15 PM and will be presented with English subtitles.
Tuesday, November 10, 2026.
A full-length Austrian feature.
German, English and French dialogue with English subtitles.
Inside the film and its making.
Discover the artist at the centre of the story and meet selected members of the cast and creative team behind the film.
“Art is contagious.”
