Director | statement by Alex Gerbaulet
Some stories find you and not vice versa. That’s what happened when I first read about Irina S. on March 9, 2011: Irina (65) Dismembers Husband. Her crime reminded me of a dream my grandmother once shared with me in the form of a confession. In her dream she killed her husband — my grandfather — and fed his body to the pigs. Later, at the traditional country feast celebrated on the occasion of slaughtering animals, she had a break down and hindered the butcher from killing her husband whom she now recognized in the pig.  
More than once my grandmother wished for death to end her hapless marriage. Nonetheless, she never found happiness after my grandfather’s passing. When I think of Irina S., I also think of my grandmother. I imagine that the two women meet and come to a different ending for their stories in the course of their exchange. Both Irina S. and my grandmother were invisible women for long periods of their lives. Invisible because the people around them — and broadly speaking society — stopped perceiving them as personalities. I, too, can hardly perceive them. Like ghosts they only become visible as negative figures through the things I learn about them — always conveyed by other people. I call them sleepers because the term also denotes agents and terrorists. Self-denial and pain as destructive forces as well as potential to reinvent oneself. The word furthermore implies that they are not only victims but also aggressors.
For my approach to Irina S. as a perpetrator I was inspired, among others, by the books of Elfriede Czurda; particularly her novel The Sleeper about a woman who kills and dismembers her lover in order to have him forever  ‘close’ to her. This book is not a horror story but an intense study of voicelessness and failure in maintaining normative gender roles. 
 

Co-Director | Statement by Mirko Winkel
The incomprehensiveness of Irina S.’s crime sparks people’s imagination. Everybody tries to find an explanation for what she did and in doing so constructs their own truth in which fact and fiction lie close together. When the people involved talked about the case, they predominantly spoke about their attitudes towards it and thus about themselves. Hence, Irina S. also interests me as a character who doesn’t speak for herself but is narrated through others. I want to find a dramaturgic form that exposes both this urge to explain and the gaps in people’s own moral entanglements.