Waldeinsamskype (Radioplay)
Sagnik Chakraborty and Lars Rudolph
(c) Helgard Haug / Rimini Protokoll
Waldeinsamskype (Radioplay)
Ein romantisches Märchen aus den deutsch-indischen Wäldern
By Helgard Haug / Daniel Wetzel
Sagnik‘s surname is Chakraborty. Maybe this is why when he telephones German customers from a call centre in Calcutta he prefers to call himself Eckbert or Eckhardt. He learned German at the Goethe Institute and likes to practise it by reading German fairy tales, the Romantics, and the poems of Schiller and Heine. (really!) His sales pitches, held on Skype, are recorded for the purposes of quality control and normally deleted after a week. But not this one, in which Sagnik meets Walter, who not only has a partiality for the gloomy tales of Ludwig Tieck, but also for brain teasers placed between the German forest and Bollywood, in which the young call centre agent is so ‘tannhäuser-ed’, that he begins to imagine he’s blonde and immortal. (acted.)
How do words like ‘Waldeinsamkeit’ (sylvan solitude) sound when they are sent out on the long route from the texts of the Romantic era, through the mouth of an Indian call centre agent via the digital communication network Skype into our ear? And can we start up a parallel film with the questions of predetermination, inevitability and guilt, in which not a blonde knight but a black-haired father of a family experiences a moment of insight?
By Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel (Rimini Protokoll)
With Sagnik Chakraborty, Lars Rudolph
Technical realisation and direction: Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel
Recordings: Martin Baierlein, Maria Ochs, Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel
A Deutschlandfunk production 2009
Editor: Elisabeth Panknin
Premiere: 02.06.2009 Deutschlandfunk