Paradise, dir. Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Berlin 2022, German with English subtitles, 81 min 42 sec.
Book tickets
Join us for a screening of Paradise (2022), followed by a conversation between the film’s directors, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff.
Across four 16mm films, Paradise unfolds in a fictional Berlin bar, shot over three years at Henkel and Pitegoff’s real-life establishment, TV Bar. Blurring fiction and documentary, the series draws on the lived reality of the bar to imagine a dystopian near-future.
The bar’s staff are forced to bartend while reading from teleprompters, carrying out their absent boss’s plan to transform the bar into a community news channel. As his grip on reality unravels, they begin to question – and gradually take control of – the texts they are made to read, creating space for humour, poetry, political expression and collective agency.
Filmed throughout TV Bar’s existence, Paradise connects the fictional with its real-life counterparts. Its presentation in bars, cafés and community spaces further extends the project's exploration of the social and economic networks that sustain and shape collective life.
Across four 16mm films, Paradise unfolds in a fictional Berlin bar, shot over three years at Henkel and Pitegoff’s real-life establishment, TV Bar. Blurring fiction and documentary, the series draws on the lived reality of the bar to imagine a dystopian near-future.
The bar’s staff are forced to bartend while reading from teleprompters, carrying out their absent boss’s plan to transform the bar into a community news channel. As his grip on reality unravels, they begin to question – and gradually take control of – the texts they are made to read, creating space for humour, poetry, political expression and collective agency.
Filmed throughout TV Bar’s existence, Paradise connects the fictional with its real-life counterparts. Its presentation in bars, cafés and community spaces further extends the project's exploration of the social and economic networks that sustain and shape collective life.
Bios
Calla Henkel is an American writer, playwright, director and artist living between Berlin and Los Angeles. Her debut novel, Other People's Clothes, was a New York Times Book Review 'Editors' Choice'.
Max Pitegoff is an American artist and director living in Los Angeles.
As a collaborative duo, Henkel and Pitegoff run New Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles. Previously, in Berlin, they ran TV Bar, Times Bar, New Theater, and the Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne. Their work has been staged and exhibited at The Hammer Museum, the Van Abbemuseum, REDCAT, Fluentum, MAMCO Geneva, Hamburger Bahnhof, the Volksbühne Berlin, and the Whitney Museum of Art, among others.
Book tickets
Wed, 09 Sep 2026
Cinema 1
06:30 pm
Ticket information
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Access information
Cinema 1
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for the following requirements:
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