When Susan Sontag was Sitting in the Audience

On the occasion of the International Women’s Day we invite together with all participants to
the cast & crew premiere of:

RP Kahl’s When Susan Sontag was Sitting in the Audience, 2022, 86 min

with Saralisa Volm, Luise Helm, Heike-Melba Fendel, Celine Yildirim, RP Kahl
and Cynthia Buchheim, Stefanie Schuster, Mario Mentrup, Kirstin Warnke, Sonja Hilberger

It’s been 50 years since the infamous panel discussion »A Dialogue on Women‘s Liberation« took place in New York‘s Town Hall: Norman Mailer, author of The Prisoner of Sex (1971), invited the feminist advocates Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Jacqueline Ceballos and Diana Trilling to argue, laugh and perform with him on stage. In the audience, not holding back with their criticism of Norman Mailer and his role, feminist icons such as Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick and Betty Friedan and the intellectual elite of New York. 

50 years later in Berlin, Saralisa Volm and RP Kahl, as Germaine Greer and Norman Mailer, fight against and with each other in a reenactment for the theatre stage with Luise Helm, Heike Melba-Fendel and Celine Yildirim and continue the discussion together backstage. The rehearsals and the reflection on their own role in the reenactment and in their own lives condense into a profound exchange about feminism in the here and now.  

A playful semi-documentary piece about enactment and self-staging, the beginnings of a new feminism and its reverberations in our time, or rather the differently judged question of what still needs to be done.

RP Kahl (*1970 in Cottbus) is a German actor, film director and film producer. After graduating from high school, Kahl trained as an actor at the Rostock branch of the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. As an actor, he has had over 70 engagements in film, television and theater productions.

RP Kahl has held teaching positions in the fields of visual arts and film at the Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts, the German Film and Television Academy Berlin and the Institute for Acting, Film and Television Professions in Berlin since 2001. In 2018, he was appointed professor at the Dekra Hochschule für Medien Berlin. In 2020, he became professor for “Acting and Production” at the SRH Berlin School of Popular Arts.

RP Kahl is a member of the advisory boards for the film selection of the Berlinale and the Oldenburg International Film Festival. He is a member of the board of the German Film Academy.