Film: Sascha
Director: Dennis Todorović, colour, 101 min., 2009/10
Sasha doesn’t feel too good. He feels somehow that he’s gay, and the fact that others are completely cool about their homosexuality – even the Foreign Minister and the Mayor of Berlin – doesn’t much help this teenager from a Montenegrin family in Cologne. Sasha’s family makes no secret of the fact that they’d be glad to hang gays from the closest lamppost.
Sasha is 19 and is getting ready for the entrance exam for a music conservatory. He’s always played the piano, and his ambitious mother sees in him a great concert pianist. But Sasha’s joys and sorrows are definitely not about that: he doesn’t know how to tell Mr Weber, his music teacher, that he’s in love with him. Even worse, time is running out – his idol is going to move to Vienna in a few days to take up a professorship.
At the moment, Sasha’s life is a total mess. The only person he can trust is Jiao, another music student, who for her part is head-over-heels in love with him. Sasha’s art-loving mother believes that her son is only thinking about his examination and that at best he only knows about butterflies in one’s stomach and lovesickness from hearsay, while his strict father can’t wait for his son to finally pick a real fight.
Dennis Todorovic deftly directs the trials and tribulations of a protagonist caught in the middle – in a bittersweet comedy about multicultural diversity and differences on one hand, and on the other, an ironic drama about family disputes and how hard it is to speak openly about one’s sexual proclivities.
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