Wilhelm Sasnal

A Year With Walser: On Wilhelm Sasnal's Film 'The Assistant'

Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972) is one of the most renown contemporary artists in Poland. In recent years, Sasnal has turned to film-making outsid

Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal’s latest film, The Assistant, premiered last month at Rotterdam International Film Festival. An adaption of a novel of 1908 by the Swiss writer Robert Walser, the film focuses on a down-at-heel young man, Joseph Marti, who is hired as the assistant to a tyrannical, delusional inventor, Karl Tobler, at his family’s lavish villa in the Swiss countryside. The film, like the book, is set in 1908, but the film-makers have incorporated modern elements too: one scene plays out like a dream-like club sequence, with dance music and strobe lighting, for instance, and there are several points where the characters refer to world events that happened after 1908.

In recent years, he has turned to film-making, many of which are made with his wife, Anka Sasnal, i