Tuesday, December 16 & Wednesday, December 17, 2025, 21:15
Iera odos 48 & Megalou Alexandrou 134-136, Kerameikos, Athens Hall B
The 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, “everything must change. RIS9,” organized by MOMus, is introducing its tribute to the work and practice of seminal artist and filmmaker Ester Krumbachová through a collaboration with the Ester Krumbachová Archive, the National Film Archive, Prague, and the Greek Film Archive via the screening of Krumbachová’s film Murdering the Devil (Czechoslovakia, 1970, 72’), within the program of the 14th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival.
The film will be screened with English and Greek subtitles in Hall B of the Greek Film Archive, on Tuesday, December 16, at 21:15, and on Wednesday, December 17, 2025, at 21:15.
It will be introduced, along with the Ester Krumbachová Archive, by Nadja Argyropoulou, curator of the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, with words by artist Blaise Kirschner, whose initiative was pivotal in making the Krumbachová estate accessible to researchers.
Ester Krumbachová (1923–1996) is best known for her exceptional and prolific work as a costume designer in film and theater, but her artistic legacy encompasses an astonishing range of disciplines, including art direction, scriptwriting, directing, fiction and theoretical essays, drawing, painting, and jewelry design and making. She was deeply respected within the Czech film circles as a powerful creative force and a mentor, affectionately described as the movement’s “spiritual guru” or éminence grise, yet her work remained largely overlooked both at home and abroad until recently.
Ester Krumbachová worked as a theater artist beginning in 1953, first in České Budějovice and later in Prague. She contributed to many important films of the Czechoslovak New Wave such as Diamonds of the Night, Daisies, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, A Carriage Going to Vienna, The Party and the Guests, Witchhammer, Fruit of Paradise, and The Ear, among others. In 1970, she directed her only film, Murdering the Devil. Since 1972, she was banned from contributing to feature films and television. She only worked occasionally on short films with Krátký Film Praha (Short Film Prague), film studios outside Prague, and several international productions. She was able to overcome the ban in 1983, when she and Věra Chytilová made The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun. After 1990 she was able to return to film once more, and her last job included script editing, set and costume design for the film Marian (1996).
The last few years have seen a wide-ranging critical reappraisal of Krumbachová’s work, with her contribution recognized through MUBI’s Notebook (January, 2026), Fashion in Film Festival, London & UK (2025), film program in BFI Southbank, London (2025), Metrograph, New York (2024), international film festivals such as IFF Karlovy Vary and Rotterdam (2024), exhibitions in Prague, Brno and Glasgow, and publications that foreground the artist’s distinctive vision. This renewed attention owes much to the achievements of the Ester Krumbachová Archive, initiated in 2016 and run by the Prague-based curatorial organization ARE. Its mission has been to digitize thousands of surviving objects, writings, scripts, and designs, and to champion new artistic and scholarly engagement with Krumbachová’s legacy. In 2016, twenty years after Ester Krumbachová’s death, her last partner, Ivan Paik, granted the ARE organization, the artist Blaise Kirschner, and a student research group from Prague’s AAAD, access to her estate. Until then, the estate had remained inaccessible, despite repeated efforts by her colleagues, friends and film historians.
The collective work and engaged research that has led to the creation, the life and accessibility of this archive honors and reflects Krumbachová’s own practice of kinship and exchange. It is celebrated, along with the artist’s work, within the Biennale, as an example of a persistent refusal to forget and ignore, of kinship in free thinking & association, of the social poesis that is a condition of possibility. Such approaches of assembling, directed to love for the dispossessed and a radical recovery of alternative grounds of insurgency, are a core concern of the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, titled “everything must change. RIS9”.
The 9th Thessaloniki Biennale or Contemporary Art runs between October 2025 and July 2026 through a few manifestations, collaborations and errant paths leading to a main exhibition due to open in late May 2026.
It is curated by independent curator Nadja Argyropoulou and organized by MOMus – Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki.
The Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art is co-financed by the European Union (NSRF – “Central Macedonia” Operational Programme).
About the film:
Murdering the Devil (Czechoslovakia, dir. Ester Krumbachová, 1970)
“She is in her forties—or near them—and life isn’t at all what she expected. Maybe a trip down memory lane could help? In her younger days there had been a splendid young man, Bohouš Čert, whom she fancied and who had also seemed interested in her. And so, she looks for and finds Bohouš Čert, who is now Engineer Čert. He has become pretentious, arrogant, self-involved—a nightmare. And still, she thinks it has to be this cretinous creature who will lead her to the altar.
Murdering the Devil remains the sole directorial effort of art director and costume designer Ester Krumbachová, who also co-wrote some of the key Czech ’60s films, like Věra Chytilová’s seminal monument of pop feminism Daisies (1966), Otakar Vávra’s vivisection of authoritarian structures Witchhammer (1968), or Jaromil Jireš’s perverse female fairy tale Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1969). Murdering the Devil had the bad luck of timing; it reached the cinemas at the extremely frosty beginning of the so-called Normalization period. Even among like-minded souls, a work so anarchic and subversive barely stood a chance. After decades in the shadows of film history, the time to rediscover this eccentric gem has come!”
—Olaf Möller, IFFR
“A subversive anti-rom-com that cooly cuts male chauvinism down to size and luxuriates in female pleasure”
—Film at Lincoln Center
“The 1960s saw a remarkable cinematic renaissance in what was then called Czechoslovakia, and Ester Krumbachová was its renaissance woman”
—Jonathan Owen, The Criterion Collection
🌐 More materials related to Murdering the Devil, found in Ester Krumbachová’s estate, are available at esterkrumachova.org under “Murdering the Devil.”
Credit
Murdering the Devil (Czechoslovakia, dir. Ester Krumbachová, 1970). Film still. © National Film Archive, Prague.
In collaboration with the Ester Krumbachová Archive and the National Film Archive, Prague, and the Greek Film Archive within the program of the 14th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival.
