The Exposure

Lili’s summer holidays take an unexpected turn when her mother pressures her to ask Dorsday, a family friend, for money to keep her father out of prison. It’s not only her dignity she might lose, but every certainty she once had.

Young Lili is forced into a most unpleasant situation by her mother: to save the family from certain ruin, Lili should succumb to the desires of a family friend, an art dealer, who would give them all the money they need – if he can look at Lili in the nude for fifteen minutes. What is more precious: a family’s good name or one woman’s convictions? 

The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s widely venerated 1924 novella Fräulein Else which has been excellently adapted several times – IFFR veterans might remember Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 1987 version featuring Edith Clever revealing Else’s inner turmoil in a monologue. Thomas Imbach chooses a comparably ascetic approach yet of uncommon visual grandeur: The Exposure was shot in a studio on 16mm in front of backdrops created with the Unreal Engine 5, a technology originally developed for video games. Physical, tactile worlds clash here, the same way that Lili’s inner voice often contradicts what we just see – making the yawning abyss between society’s forces and free will sometimes comically, sometimes gruesomely palpable. A true filmmaking coup!

– Olaf Möller

Trailer

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