Sophie (Maren Eggert), a young photographer, comes to Marseille from Berlin by simple and spontaneous coincidence in an apartment swap with a French student that she comes across in a newspaper ad. She drifts through the city in winter, taking photographs and considering romance. Though life back home resurfaces and she begins to contemplate her relationship to Ivan and Hanna.

Enigmatic and compelling, Angela Schanelec’s cinema resists easy classification. Trained as an actress at the Hochschule für Darstellende Kunst and active in theatre for nearly a decade, she turned to film after a revelatory encounter with Robert Bresson’s L’argent. Leaving theatre behind, she enrolled at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in Berlin from 1990 to 1995, where she created several shorts and her thesis film I Stayed in Berlin All Summer.

Over the past thirty years, Schanelec has forged a singular body of work that is elliptical, philosophical, and emotionally resonant. Her commitment to the straight cut and use of ellipses, which skip over time and events, reflect a cinema of precision not as technical display but as a way to embody the inner lives of her characters and the spaces they inhabit. At its core, her work intertwines cinema and theatre to cultivate a heightened sense of moment and presence – a cinema of being, becoming, and the exploration of existence itself.

Places in Cities (1998)
Orly (2010)
I Was at Home, But… (2019)
Music (2023)

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Director: Angela Schanelec
Cast: Maren Eggert, Alexis Loret, Emily Atef, Marie-Lou Sellem
Cinematography: Reinhold Vorschneider
Screenwriter: Angela Schanelec
Producer: Julien Berlan, Michael Weber, Florian Koerner von Gustorf
Editor: Bettina Böhler
Music: Dirk Jacob, Martin Steyer
Hungarian Distributor: -
Colour: colour
min: 95 mins

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