A film by Marie Luise Lehner
Austria 2025, 87 min
NRW-Premiere
Followed by a film talk with actress Mariya Menner.
Late summer in Vienna. Anna is twelve and lives a loving but cramped life with her deaf mother Isolde. The move to grammar school changes Anna’s life. Her classmates come from a completely different social class and Anna begins to feel ashamed of her background and her single mother. During the ski week, she has to pretend to be ill. The money set aside for the ski course is used to buy a sofa bed, which is intended to give her mother a sexual relationship and her daughter a little more privacy. Anna finds an accomplice in her classmate Mara, who provokes her with feminist questions and also lives alone with her queer father.
In her feature film debut, Marie Luise Lehner unconditionally stands by her heroines, gives them space for introspection and outbursts, allows them to row back and reconcile. Not fitting in allows them to get to know and appreciate themselves. Lehner flies the colourful flag of solidarity, quite naturally and with plenty of pop culture references.
Austria 2025 – Director & screenplay: Marie Luise Lehner – Cinematographer: Simone Hart – Editors: Jana Libnik, Joana Scrinzi, Alexandra Schneider – With Siena Popović, Mariya Menner, Jessica Paar, Kathrin Resetarits, Daniel Sea and others. – German distributor: Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V., arsenal-berlin.de
Marie Luise Lehner
Marie Luise Lehner was born in 1995 and lives in Vienna. A filmmaker, author, and punk musician. After studying at the Institut für Sprachkunst at the University of Applied Arts, she studied screenwriting at the Film Academy Vienna. She is pursuing master’s degrees in directing at the Film Academy and in contextual painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. She has written scripts, prose, and two novels. Her short films have been shown at various international film festivals and her literary works have received many prizes. Since 2012, she has caused a furore with her feminist punk band Schapka.
