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Gaspard Ulliel, Vicky Krieps in "More than ever": How do you spend your farewell days?
Photo: Pandora Movies
"More than ever"
Hélène has finally scaled the hill known by the locals as "Hill of Reception".
Far and wide, this is the only place in Norway where you can use your cell phone.
Everywhere in the landscape people are sitting and having conversations.
Hélène fought her way up here, she is suffering from an incurable lung disease that is making her unable to breathe.
The 33-year-old knows that she will only make a few phone calls in her life.
She calls her boyfriend.
A difficult conversation.
Because Hélène wants to spend her last days alone.
The German-French-Iranian director Emily Atef, 49, has succeeded in creating an extremely haunting, at the same time sad and comforting drama with her film »More than Ever«.
Together with her leading actress, Vicky Krieps, 39, she tells a complex and moving story about how difficult it is to decide about one's own death.
The art of this film is to bring us closer to a character who thinks and feels very differently than probably most.
»More than ever« makes it clear from the start that there is a boundary between terminally ill and healthy people that is difficult to cross.
Step by step, the film describes Hélène's alienation from the living, including from her boyfriend Mathieu (Gaspard Ulliel).
How the two try to have sex again, although Hélène's condition no longer allows it - Atef and her actors turn this into a heartbreaking love scene full of lust, desperation and tenderness.
It is gripping how the Berlin-based Luxembourger Krieps, who already shone as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the historical film »Corsage« this year, combines fragility with strength and embodies Hélène's constant struggle of conflicting feelings.
Lars Olav Beier
"More than ever".
France/Germany/Norway/Luxembourg 2021. Director: Emily Atef.
Book: Atef, Lars Hubrich.
Starring Vicky Krieps, Gaspard Ulliel, Bjorn Floberg.
123 minutes.
»The Silent Trabants«
It is the sentimentalities and longings of the so-called little people that the writer Clemens Meyer and the filmmaker Thomas Stuber use to warm the hearts of cinema viewers who are in the spirit of Advent.
In the films »Herbert« (2015) and »In the gangs« (2018), the two have already told of sympathetically battered people from the boxing and supermarket helper milieu.
In »The Quiet Trabants« you can now see Martina Gedeck as a drinking-loving lane cleaner.
Or Albrecht Schuch in the role of a smart but not very successful man behind the snack bar.
A melancholy like in the plays by Ödön von Horváth characterizes the proletarian passion of people who apparently live in and around Leipzig.
And if these people get any hope, you immediately fear that they will soon end up in a ditch with broken wings.
Charly Hübner, for example, plays a security guard who falls in love with a young refugee (Irina Starshenbaum).
The film, in which the actress Nastassja Kinski also celebrates a comeback, sometimes tells drastically about the sex crisis, exploitation and the hope of redemption - and yet always looks tenderly at its characters.
At the latest when the credits roll, most of the audience should be in the mood to light a candle for the heroines of this film.
Wolfgang Hoebel
»The silent satellites«.
Germany 2022. Director: Thomas Stuber.
Book: Stuber, Clemens Meyer.
With Martina Gedeck, Lilith Stangenberg, Albrecht Schuch.
120 minutes.
"Sun"
The singing of the three friends is thin and droning, but their moves and their outfit make up for it: Shaking their butts and wearing a headscarf at the same time, Yesmin (Melina Benli), Nati (Maya Wopienka) and Bella (Law Wallner) sing the nineties hit »Losing My Religion« by REM and film themselves doing it.
In the Muslim community of Vienna, where the three students live, the clip initially went viral.
Then comes the trouble.
Yesmin is the only one growing up in a Muslim family.
Headscarf up, headscarf down: this has real consequences for her, while for her friends it's just a pose.
For more than ten years, the Austrian-Kurdish director Kurdwin Ayub has been testing how the search for identity works across countries and media, primarily in documentaries – including on herself and her own family.
This is how the portrait »Paradise!
Paradise!” by her incredibly entertaining father, who plans to retire and move back to Iraq.
In Ayub's first feature film »Sonne«, which won Best Debut at the Berlinale, her father and mother are there, they play Yesmin's parents, who in turn is Ayub's alter ego.
The mixture of the autobiographical and the fictional makes »Sonne« dazzling.
However, the strengths of the film are not on the meta level, but in the directness with which Ayub approaches her characters and tells of their messy lives.
She is already planning her next feature film, »Moon«.
Hannah Pilarczyk
"Sun".
Austria 2022. Written and directed by Kurdwin Ayub.
With Melina Benli, Law Wallner, Maya Wopienka.
88 minutes.
In streaming
»The Miracle« (Netflix)
»We are nothing without our stories«, says the narrator at the beginning of »The Miracle«, and the camera pans across a film set into a scene from Ireland in 1862. The fantastic actress Florence Pugh is there as a British nurse see who travels to the deeply Catholic neighboring country to witness a miracle.
A 10-year-old girl, daughter of a poor peat cutter, reportedly hasn't eaten in four months.
The nurse is to keep watch over her and observe whether the child is really living only on "manna from heaven," as she says herself.
The miracle at the heart of the film are the stories we tell ourselves to give meaning to our lives.
Stories that can be so powerful that parents are willing to sacrifice their child's life for them.
But sometimes, as the celebrated Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio shows, we write the stories of our lives ourselves, or we even manage to rewrite them and give them a new direction.
With floating images, Lelio creates an utterly unbelievable story, the ending of which is as filling as the best manna in heaven, even if it's the people alone who write it.
Oliver Kaever
"The wonder".
USA/GB/IRL 2022. Director: Sebastián Lelio.
Book: Alice Birch, Emma Donoghue, Lelio.
Starring Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, Niamh Algar.
103 minutes.