Bob Wilson's Life & Death of Marina Abramovic

About The Film

This documentary film captures the creation of an experimental opera based on the biography of legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic, directed by Robert Wilson with music and performance by singer and composer Anohni, and featuring actor Willem Dafoe as a central figure.

Director Giada Colagrande provides access to the process of making the piece through rehearsal footage and interviews with the artists as they work — revealing the complex dynamics, creative tensions, and moments of genuine discovery that accompany the development of a performance of this kind. The result is an intimate portrait of four major artists in collaboration: Wilson's exacting visual sensibility in dialogue with Abramovic's biography of radical durational endurance, Anohni's vocal presence, and Dafoe's physical precision.

The film documents both the content of the piece — which treats Abramovic's life, her Serbian childhood, her decades of physical and conceptual performance, and the mythology that has grown around her — and the process of translating that biography into Wilson's distinctive theatrical language of image, light, and formalized movement. Rather than serving simply as a record of a production, the film functions as its own kind of portrait: of the making of art, the trust required between artists, and the particular vulnerability of creating something large and strange together.