Sleeping Beauty

Internationally Justesen and Rex are among the pioneers in the endeavours to add a Feminist perspective to avant-garde art. In the film SLEEPING BEAUTY they applied what was at the time a radical, female gaze on reality by letting seven women of varying ages present their dreams and yearnings in realistic and stylised tableaux.The core of the scenes often concerns erotic life: An older woman wearing suspenders and a bra talks about her lovers as she lounges in her sofa, stroking her fur coat. A young woman is breastfeeding her child while musing on the subject of orgasms, and a middle-aged woman is dancing a waltz with herself. But social and political reality is also described in bizarre ways – e.g. by a young girl playing with her doll’s house, and by an old woman sitting in a vast, open landscape, knitting political events of the world into her work.