Join us to watch the film ‚The Chairs Game (Reise nach Jerusalem)‘ with English subtitles on the big screen in our hall. Free entry!
Germany 2016-2018, Director: Lucia Chiarla, colour, 120 min.
A cinematic ode to the outsider in which a woman, Alice, who is unable to find a job, is faced with falling by the wayside in society. Within her personal sphere, she is more or less successful at maintaining the facade of an intact freelancer career. In truth, however, the only thing keeping her head above water are the petrol vouchers she gets as compensation for absurd jobs at market research institutes.
Alice is a 39-year-old freelance copywriter and editor who is, as she vehemently emphasises, temporally unemployed. After the loss of her agency job, she first ends assisting sales representatives in sweet-talking customers – for which she "earns" petrol vouchers. Later, in the various state-sponsored re-training measures forced upon her, all that the participants do is sleep en masse, read, or tilt back their office chairs. And during the interview for the one single promising job, the stupid Skype goes down.
When Alice simply stops going to her current training class, her dole payments are cut and she runs out of money. Asking her parents or friends for help would be like capitulating – and there's no way that's going to happen!
To keep up appearances, she enmeshes herself in an ever-increasing entanglement of inextricable white lies. Soon, she feels like her life is a never-ending battle against the wind for just a little bit of happiness and success. Or for a single pack of chocolate cookies.
The debut feature film of Lucia Chiarla is carried by the presence and performance of Eva Löbaus. She literally carries every single scene in the movie, and plays Alice's inexorable downwards spiral of despair with credibility and an at times painful comprehensibility.
'The Chairs Game' reveals the flipside of the hipster stronghold that is today's Berlin, with all its start-ups and young creative agencies. The film's title is a reference to the eponymous parlour game (a.k.a. "musical chairs"), the loaded metaphoric intention of which is reflected on every level and from every angle in the narrative. The director creates a realistic reflection of today's social order, and shows Alice as one of the many people now being confronted with the threat of losing their grip on life and society.
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