Aftersun
Pools, boats, lounges, arcade games, a summer resort. A young girl bonds with her father.
98'
United States
IFFR 2023
On the evening of 25 March 1996, Jan Philipp Reemtsma – tobacco-empire scion and multi-millionaire, academic, publicist and patron of the arts – was kidnapped in the vicinity of his Hamburg home. After a ransom of tens of millions of Mark was paid, Reemtsma was returned to his family. But what did his partner, psychoanalyst Ann-Kathrin Scheerer, and their son Johann do during those days of fearful waiting?
The latter, by now a successful music producer, remembered these times in his first book, which he insists on calling a novel: Wir sind dann wohl die Angehörigen (2018), which Hans-Christian Schmid has now turned into an extraordinarily sensitive piece of cinema. It is an anti-thriller that talks about the attempts of Reemtsma’s family and the police to keep up a sense of normality under the most extreme of circumstances.
Schmid shows how very deep, momentary yet nevertheless real emotions and relationships develop, in a setting that could barely be more theatrical, with cops becoming housemates etc. A subject truly to his liking, of course, as some of Schmid’s greatest films, like the made-for-TV fiction feature debut Himmel und Hölle (1994), or 23 (1998) or Requiem (2006) all deal directly with the fragile, illusory nature of reality. A masterpiece. Really.
– Olaf Möller
IFFR 2023
Programme IFFR 2023
Avant-premieres and cinematic highlights of this year’s festival circuit: eagerly anticipated audience favourites and international award-winners.
Read more about this programmePools, boats, lounges, arcade games, a summer resort. A young girl bonds with her father.
98'
United States
IFFR 2023
Marital frustration, a mid-life crisis and a Nietzsche-quoting frog in an animated adaptation of Haruki Murakami.
108'
France
IFFR 2023
An alluringly shot tale of repressed desire and unspoken longing set in Salé, Morocco.
118'
Morocco
IFFR 2023