November 2024

Harald Naegeli, born 1939 in Zurich, is the Zurich Sprayer. Convicted of causing criminal damage with his graffiti, he ran away to Germany where he received support from Joseph Beuys. In 1982, Switzerland issued an international arrest warrant against him and he subsequently spent 6 months in prison for his art. In 1984, he moved to Germany where he lived in exile for almost 20 years. He returned to Zurich in 2020 suffering from terminal cancer. During the Covid 19 lockdown, he sprayed more than 50 Dance of Death figures in the city. These Grim Reapers, he says, are his final answer, or the final utopia in his life for society. While the Canton of Zurich presses charges against him, the City of Zurich presents him with its annual City Art Award of 50 000 Swiss francs which he is donating to environmental and animal rights charities. Today Harald Naegeli is 84 years old. This film is an hommage to a great utopian.

Harald Naegeli - The Zurich Sprayer
Switzerland/Germany (20201, 97 min., Swiss German/German with English Subtitles
Writer-Director: Nathalie David, Idea: Peter Spoerri, Music: Andrina Bollinger, Cinematography: Adrian Stähli, Nathalie David, Editing: Nathalie David, Producers: Peter Spoerri, Nathalie David, Production Company: PS Film GmbH (Zürich)

Nathalie David, born in France, studied fine arts at the Villa Arson in Nice and the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, with subsequent additional studies at Pontus Hultén's Institut des Hautes Études in Paris and a fellowship at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Potsdam-Babelsberg. She sees the documentary perspective as a genre and a specific art process. Her work includes films, radio plays, photographs, and drawings. She lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin.

Nathalie David's project is a film about the poet, collector, architect, and patron of the arts Edward James, who lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1962 (from 1946 mostly as a visitor). There he was friends with, among others, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Ruth Ford, and Jack Larson, but he also socialized with Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Igor Stravinsky. In 1946 he moved to Mexico, where he spent 30 years building a unique ensemble of Surrealist architecture in collaboration with the indigenous population. The unrecognized grandson of Edward VII, he built the largest private collection of Surrealist art, beginning in 1933. Without his patronage, Surrealism would not have achieved the prominence it has today.

Selected Filmography
2022 | Video clip for “Ballade vom Sprayer” (Sophie Hunger)
2021 |Harald Naegeli – Der Sprayer von Zürich
2020 |Elias Crespin – L'Onde du Midi, with Valery Faidherbe, Musée du Louvre

Selected Prizes and Awards
2022 | Nominated for German Documentary Film Award forHarald Naegeli – Der Sprayer von Zürich
2021 | Nominated for Sichtwechsel Award at Filmfest Hamburg forHarald Naegeli – Der Sprayer von Zürich
2017 | Artist in Residence, Goethe-Institut, Porto Alegre, Brazil

Dr. Albrecht Dümling is a musicologist and music critic living in Berlin. After finishing his doctoral dissertation, he worked as a music critic for the Berlin newspaper “Der Tagesspiegel” (1978-1998) and the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (1999-2003).  He is a contributor to the “Neue Musik-Zeitung” and several radio programs. In 1988 he created a critical reconstruction of the Nazi exhibition “Entartete Musik” (Degenerate Music, Düsseldorf 1938). As a Getty Scholar he curated a new version of this exhibition for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. Since 1990 Dümling is chairman of “musica reanimata“, a society for the promotion of composers persecuted by the Nazis, which in 2006 was awarded the German Critics’ Prizeand, to date, has organized more than 160 lecture concerts at the Konzerthaus Berlin.

His research focuses on music policy in the Nazi state and musicians in exile. In 2000-2004 Dümling conducted a research project on German-speaking refugee musicians in Australia. He is editor of the book series “Verdrängte Musik/Suppressed Music”. Other books focus on Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, musical performing rights, Leon Jessel, Gideon Klein and Artur Schnabel. His latest publication tells the story of the Weintraubs Syncopators.  For his activities Dümling was awarded in 2007 with the European Cultural Prize KAIROS of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation Hamburg and in 2021 with the Order of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Samuel Glicklich is currently a Bachelors of Music Candidate at the Colburn Conservatory. This past year, he was awarded 2nd prize in the “2022 Casagrande International Piano Competition” in Terni, Italy. He was also the winner of the 2022 Colburn School concerto competition. Additionally, Samuel was recently awarded the “Young Talents” scholarship from the Musique & Vin au Clos Vougeot festival in France, co-directed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Gautier Capuçon. In previous years, Samuel was awarded 3rd prize at the 2021 Singapore International Piano Competition, prize winner in the 2021 Canada International Piano Competition, gold medal in the Seattle International Piano Competition, first prize in the Glendale Piano Competition, and winner of the Aspen Music Festival Concerto Competition. Samuel was also a prize winner in the 2021 Canada International Piano Competition.