A feminist comedy in pink and baby-blue.
Goethe Pop Up Seattle, in partnership with
Northwest Film Forum,
Three Dollar Bill Cinema, and
Gay City, presents Queer Cinema from Germany, a virtual film series that serves as an introduction to the multiplicity of stories at the heart of contemporary LGBTIQ+ films.
This film series is part of
Queer as German Folk, a project celebrating the intersectional histories of Germany’s and America’s diverse LGBTIQ+ communities. A digitally modified version of the exhibition
Queer as German Folk and a full program of virtual events is presented by the
Goethe-Institut in North America in collaboration with its
Goethe Pop Ups and the
Schwules Museum Berlin (SMU).
Please register in advance and pay what you can. All ticket purchases support the community partners.
About the film:
Germany/France/Denmark | 2019 | 80 minutes
In search of a place to sleep, the melancholy girl roams the big city. On the way she meets young mothers who celebrate their motherhood as a religious revival experience, finds shelter with an abstinent existentialist for whom sex is "just another market", and waits in a drag bar "for the end of capitalism". Her attempt to write a book fails because of the first sentence of the second chapter, and she finds no place between art galleries, yoga studios, and the beds of strange men. Instead of trying to fit in, the girl begins to see her depression as a political issue.
In 15 comical encounters,
Aren’t You Happy explores our postmodern society between precarity and self-marketing, serial monogamy and neo-spirituality, disillusionment, and the compulsion to be happy. Susanne Heinrich's debut film combines pop and theory, feminism and humor - and is full of sentences that you want to see shining in neon letters on billboards.
"In the beginning was my discomfort in society [...] In a seminar on Queer Theory I came into contact with Karen Michalski's
Alphabet of Feeling Bad, a video work about negative feelings. Seeing this work changed everything. I would probably never have thought of seeing depression not as a fault, illness or individual failure, but rather to politicize it in the context of neoliberal labor and gender relations, for example.” Susanne Heinrich.
About the filmmakers:
Susanne Heinrich (writer, director)
Susanne Heinrich, a pastor's daughter from East Germany, wrote four books between the ages of 19 and 25 (most recently
American Emotions, Dumont 2011) and has been invited to the Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt, the Villa Aurora L.A. and the Casa Baldi Olevano Romano (Villa Massimo). She has also sung in various bands and pursued other artistic projects. With her first short film she was accepted at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb).
Aren’t You Happy is her first film.
Agnesh Pakozdi (cinematographer)
Agnesh Pakozdi was born in Budapest, Hungary. A former economist, she studied film art and image design in Budapest, at the Berlin University of the Arts, and at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). She continued her education at the Global Cinematography Institute in Los Angeles in 2015. In the last decade, she has made three full-length feature films, more than 20 short films and numerous documentary films as well as art projects as an image designer in Germany, Georgia, Switzerland, USA, Egypt, Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Hungary. Her films have been shown successfully at international festivals, including Rotterdam, Cannes, Oberhausen, Angers, the Viennale, and the Week of Film Criticism.
Registration
Back
