Angela Schanelec
After a 13-year-old student disappears without a trace for a week and suddenly reappears, his mother and teachers are confronted with existential questions that change their whole view of life.
Theres and Kenneth are both young when they first meet whilst on holiday. They fall in love but are unable to prevent themselves from losing each other. Thirty years later, in another country, another couple: Ariane leaves her husband David because she no longer loves him. The paths they both take lead them to Kenneth and Theres.
A character study as well as a meditation on communication, creativity, and physical space, Take What You Can Carry is a picture of a young woman seen through the interiors she occupies and the company she keeps. A North American living abroad, Lilly aspires to shape an intimate and private place of her own while connecting to the world around her. When she receives a letter from home, it provides the conduit she needs to fuse her transient self with the person she's always known herself to be.
Thirteen European directors explore the theme of Sarajevo; what this city has represented in European history over the past hundred years, and what Sarajevo stands for today in Europe. These eminent filmmakers of different generations and origins offer exceptional singular styles and visions.
Schanelec's contribution to the omnibus film The Bridges of Sarajevo depicts a couple reading excerpts (one reciting in Serbian, the other translating into German) from the trial of Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenberg.
Thirteen German directors present short films exploring the state of their country.
A family spends three summer days in a beautiful lake mansion close to Berlin. Together with her new lover, Irene visits her brother Alex, who still inhabits the house with Irene's writer son Konstantin. Konstantin's girl-friend pops in, too, and all of them drift away from each other more and more. Based on Chekhov’s The Seagull
Sophie, a young photographer, exchanges her apartment with a student from Marseille. It is February and Marseille seems harsh and closed in the bright sun. Sophie dives into the city, she is alone, she takes photographs. In an auto-repair garage, she asks a young mechanic, Pierre, if he can get her a car. Two days later they meet again and spend the evening in a bar, captivated by the lightness of not knowing anything about each other. Sophie is happy. When she returns to Berlin, she is immediately immersed again in her former life. Her love for Ivan, the husband of her best friend Hanna, remains undeclared and the relationship between Hanna and Ivan seems to dominate. Sophie remains on the outside, yearns to leave, and decides to travel to Marseille for a second time.
Two young women sitting in a café on a summer day. Situations found everyday a thousand times over. But what happens when you try to depict this normality?
Can and his girlfriend, Jale, live with their young daughter, Meral, in a tough Turkish neighbourhood of Berlin and barely manage to scrape enough money together for their existence. Can is a small-time dealer and errand-boy for drug boss Hakan, who has to keep his customers supplied within his narrowly staked out territory. Jale, who works in the ware-house of a department store, has been pressing Can to give up this activity. Can, also fed up with his situation, sees a bright new beginning for himself and his family when Hakan offers him the prospective chance to run a bar on his very own. But Can has little control over the pressures that gradually begin to build up around him and soon finds himself floundering in quicksand.
Mimmi is a very lonely girl not knowing what to do with her life. On the search for friends and boy-friends she strays lonely in different cities. Also Paris seems to be a place where nobody is interested in her..
A young photographer has fallen in love with his girlfriend’s sister. Nobody knows quite what to do. A stylish variation on the problems of triolism made with striking stability of style and a great feeling for mise-en-scène. The film provides an impressive mixture of stylised camera angles and realism, by filming taut and geometrically in simple interiors and existing locations. Her self-confidently designed, naturally acted everyday drama made German critics compare it with the greats from film history.
Nadine is obsessed by a memory linked to a haunting tune she can no longer sing, until she hears someone else singing and everything falls back into place again. A melancholic observation of two young couples having difficulties trusting one another. They are full of skepticism and searching for a purpose in life.
Prompted by a seminar given by acclaimed German filmmaker Peter Nestler, Prague, March '92 combines 16mm footage shot over the course of a week in the title city with excerpts from Bohumil Hrabal's essay "The Magic Flute," which considers the 20th anniversary demonstrations in Prague to commemorate the death of Jan Palach, who immolated himself in January 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion.
A story told in the off about the growing discomfort towards the new roommate Valentin. The camera pans through the empty room, over the shadows on the wall and the wallpaper, the yellow scarf and the postcard from Italy with the sunflowers
This somewhat superficial historical drama is about the 1525 Peasants' War in Germany when the lower classes rebelled against oppressive conditions imposed by the clergy and nobility and then committed many acts (including atrocities) that did not morally set them far apart from the people they were fighting. It was a time of upheaval: Martin Luther (1483-1556) had broken away from the Catholic Church, calling for reform, and Anabaptists in Germany, like Thomas Munzer fought on the side of the peasants (opposed by Luther). This complex age and its political and religious turmoil are summed up in a story about an attack on a small monastery whose monks used a forged document to confiscate some land from the peasants. When their wrong-doing is revealed by the monk who forged the document in the first place, the peasants attack.
The aristocratic families of Rossitz and Warwand, who are relatives, have started to treat each other with mistrust and hatred, since a testamentary contract has stated, that the complete goods will be inherited to the respective surviving line. At the same time the young generation is in love, how can the tender ties between Agnes of Warwand and Ottokar of Rossitz be protected? Killed by their own fathers, they lie in their blood. A radical drama about the term "family". (www.filmgalerie451.de)
A boy who grows up with his step-parents in Greece and who, at the age of 20, unwittingly murders his father. While serving his sentence, he falls in love and has a child with a woman who works in the prison. They are both unaware of the fact that she is his biological mother. Twenty years later, he lives in London with his daughter and is beginning to lose his eyesight.
This early, Godard-inspired structuralist sketch analyzes an empty apartment by way of a continuous pan as Schanelec's voice-over narration recounts her uneasiness with her new roommate.
