Film Screening
Angela Schanelec: I Was at Home, But...

Goethe-Kino

Wed, 29.01.2020
7:00 PM Goethe-Institut London

Following our retrospective "Always Somewhere Else - The Cinema of Angela Schanelec in Dialogue" curated by Patrick Holzapfel in September 2018, we are pleased to present the London premiere of the director’s latest film. It won Schanelec the Silver Bear for best direction at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019.
 
13-year old Phillip reappears at his school after having been missing for a week. His mother Astrid rushes to meet him. She is so overpowered by feelings that she is unable to speak. Phillip doesn’t speak either, doesn’t explain what happened. Their family life, which also includes Phillip’s little sister Flo, returns to normal, so it seems. Phillip rehearses Hamlet at school, Astrid buys a bicycle, carries on her work in the Berlin cultural scene. But something is off kilter. The death of Astrid’s husband, the children’s father, two years earlier may be a reason as well as Phillip’s growing independence. Astrid finds it difficult to cope; she starts to question her life.
 
German film critic Katja Nicodemos has described Schanelec’s films as “Kino der lichten Klarheit” (Cinema of bright clearness), and I Was at Home, But… also shares this quality. We sense the emotional tension, loss, and confusion, but all this is expressed with great concreteness and a trust in what is before our eyes. A puzzling prologue may suggest a deep underlying symbolism, but as Schanelec said it just shows something she wanted to see.  She throws up questions about the communicative value of language and the authenticity of performances in theatre, but she makes us see and hear the material presence of the world as we have not experienced it before.
Tickets über Eventbrite buchen Germany, Serbia 2019, colour, DCP, 105 mins. With English subtitles.
Written and directed by Angela Schanelec. With Maren Eggert, Jakob Lassalle, Clara Moeller, Franz Rogowski, Lilith Stangenberg, Alan Williams, Jirka Zett, Dane Komljen