Joseph Beuys was a visionary artist whose work was ahead of its time. He was the first German 

artist to be granted a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The film begins with his performance How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare in 1965 at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, in which he whispers abstruse art theory to a dead rabbit: “You want to make a revolution without a laugh?” Sculptor, performer, shaman, theoretician; still a charismatic, revolutionary and provocative artist thirty years after his death, his name is surrounded by an aura of myth. Andres Veiel reconstructs Beuys’s life between art, teaching and politics, and returns to the climate of debate, resistance and utopia in which he worked. 
Previously unreleased audio and video footage show a portrait of Beuys that, like the artist himself, leaves room for ideas instead of proclaiming affirmations, and makes explicit the tensions that gave life to his concept of a total work of art. 

Andres Veiel 
Born in Stuttgart in 1959, he studied directing and dramaturgy at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin under Krzysztof Kieślowski. He directed his first documentary in 1992, followed by Balagan (Berlinale 1994) and Black Box BRD (Berlinale 2002). His feature film debut If Not Us, Who premiered in the Berlinale Competition in 2011 and won the Alfred Bauer Prize. In 2013 he directed the premiere of his play Das Himbeerreich.