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.
Rubikon is not a film that relies entirely on special effects or particular action scenes. What Leni Lauritsch has made is actually a successful and often adrenaline-fuelled Kammerspiel in which also important moral questions are raised. How are we responsible for the health of our planet? How important is it to think about safeguarding the common good? And, above all, what will happen to our children?
In autumn, overripe things fall. And similarly, there seems to be no certainty for the relationships between the protagonists of 1 Verabredung im Herbst. Yet at the same time, Sebastian Brauneis stages the complexity of feelings and interpersonal relationships with an uncommon lightness.
The bizarre situations staged by David Schalko in the series Me and the Others are initially presented as a pure divertissement: we do not know why the protagonist is able to make these wishes, nor do we know who is able to make his dreams come true. Then, slowly, the music changes. At the Berlinale 2021.
Pastel-coloured cinematography and an almost naïve characterisation of the protagonists and their gestures immediately give Fische a light, sensitive, almost carefree atmosphere, as if they were in a sort of dimension suspended in time. And this is the perfect counterpoint to the first lines of dialogue between the two young protagonists. All this because of a conflict that can only be overcome when a much-needed lightness is rediscovered.
The Diver Inside is a film made up of silences, of confidences, of meaningful dialogues. All this is enriched by a real fascination for the art world in all its aspects, through the creation of stop-motion short films – with hands shaping and repositioning figures made of plasticine – as well as through jazz music composition.
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.