“OUTSIDER. FREUD” is a 66-minute creative documentary that blends animation, archival footage, and filmed interviews to explore the life and legacy of Sigmund Freud through the lens of marginality. Structured in four acts, the film traces Freud’s experience as a Jewish outsider in Vienna during the rise of Nazism, and how this shaped both his personal life and theoretical work. It engages with themes of exile, identity, power, and the tensions between the psychoanalytic tradition and its Jewish and queer undercurrents. Featuring leading voices in contemporary psychoanalysis, the film has been screened and awarded at numerous international festivals, including Haifa, Mannheim, Jaipur, Berlin, New Delhi, and Paris. Produced in collaboration with ARTE, ORF, RBB, SVT, and the Israeli Public Broadcast Corporation.

“The film invites the audience into Freud’s intimate and personal world, demonstrating how the combination of letters, archival materials, visual language, and cinematic editing can offer a new interpretation — a renewed encounter with someone who often feels overly familiar.”

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this presentation participants will be able:

1. Attendees will learn how the affective atmosphere of cinematic storytelling enables a renewed interpretive encounter with Freud.
2. Attendees will examine the ways in which documentary and artistic re-imaginings of Freud’s life and writings can illuminate the tensions between biography, myth, and psychoanalytic truth.

Yair Qedar

Yair Qedar is a filmmaker and social activist, specializing in literary biographies. In his project named the “Hebrews”, he produced and directed in the last 12 years 19 documentary films on Jewish writers and poets, creating a cinematic language that uses archives, animation and music, winning over 30 International and Israeli awards, his work screened in ZDF, ARTE, SVT, KAN, ERT and others. His latest film is “OUTSIDER. FREUD” about the life and work of Freud, supported ny RBB, ARTE, ORR, KAN, coming out mid 2025.