With Mermaids don’t cry, director Franziska Pflaum has realised a kind of delicate and symbolic contemporary fairytale, in which a magnetic protagonist represents a kind of postmodern heroine on her (often difficult) path towards a new self-awareness. At the Diagonale’23.
Goldfish have very powerful eyesight and are able to see what humans often miss. Who is the mysterious killer? Das letzte Problem cleverly takes its cue from what has been made in the past while at the same time creating an enjoyable, adrenaline-fuelled detective story with a welcome retro touch.
This brilliant Caviar – Elena Tikhonova’s second feature – boasts rhythms that are well marked both by an expert and self-conscious direction – complete with short animation inserts and Tarantino-like titling – and by an appropriate, lively and distinctive, but never over the top, musical score.
Dealing with love – and, above all, understanding its true meaning – is not at all easy for Charlie and her friends. The same applies to eroticism, which they consider almost an antidote against boredom, but which, in fact, pervades the entire Beautiful Girl with a pulsating, implicit tension.
If The Trouble with Being Born – directed by Sandra Wollner – on the one hand, reveals a good knowledge of film medium, on the other hand, it ends up being an essentially inconclusive film, which does not always make the most of its potential.
In L’Animale, Katarina Mückstein, despite her little experience behind the camera, has portrayed the world of adolescents with commendable skill, demonstrating her ability to deal with difficult subjects with a lightness reminiscent of the French school.