Director's Portrait:

Form as a framework within which life finds a place - Angela Schanelec's films are characterized by a paradox. On the one hand, with respect to form, her works are the most self-contained and - in the best sense of the word - self-willed on the entire German film scene. However, her intrinsically quiet takes, together with the hypersensitive sound track, lead to the development of an immense openness; they capture atmosphere and everyday moments which set forth reality almost in passing. Critics often see Angela Schanelec, who admits to taking Maurice Pialat and Robert Bresson as her models, in close connection with French cinema. Schanelec herself reacts soberly to this French comparison: "My films come about as the result of observation and the way I feel about reality, that is all".

Schanelec's new film Passing Summer (Mein langsames Leben) follows a handful of people, aged around thirty, through a summer and an autumn in Berlin. Basically, "follow" is the wrong word, for usually the camera remains static and constitutes the section where life is taking place at a specific time. The characters sit in a café, in the kitchen or a restaurant, by a lake and in the park. They talk about their work and their holidays, about marriage and whether it is okay to simply earn some money in your profession rather than try to change the world. "In this film there is no conflict in the classical, dramatic sense", says Schanelec, "I was interested in what these young people do with their lives. It is a matter of the familiar, of a normality which each person handles in a different way."

Normality, in Schanelec's work, is conversations which appear to have been filmed from the next table, scenes in which people's talk is confused and they interrupt each other, making tense digs at the others and sitting in troubled silence. However, the natural quality of the dialogue here is not the result of improvisation, but of precision work with the actors, whereby Schanelec can of course call upon her own experience.

Basically, her first career is already behind her: she trained as an actress and worked on stage for seven years, at such well-known theaters as the Hamburg Thalia Theater, the Berlin Schaubühne and the Schauspielhaus in Bochum. "A time came when the chapter 'acting' was over for me, I wanted to make films, I knew that with great clarity and intuition."

From 1990 onwards, Schanelec studied Direction at the German Academy of Film and Television (dffb) in Berlin. Her graduation film My Sister's Good Fortune (Das Glück meiner Schwester) was already something of a monolith on the film scene. It tells the story of two sisters who love the same man. The presence of the city of Berlin, which exists on the sound track as uninterrupted traffic noise, forms a contrast to the almost physical proximity to the characters.

In her next film, Places in Cities (Plätze in Städten), Schanelec concentrated fully on the perceptions of her nineteen-year-old protagonist: first sexual experiences, the reticence of puberty and everyday life in a wintertime Berlin. "In both films, I remain very close to the characters. I wanted to portray the city as you experience it as an inhabitant: as a constant, vague presence, as a murmur, as a city per se." Places in Cities (Plätze in Städten) was the only German contribution to be shown in the Cannes section "Un certain regard" in 1998.

Together with her colleague from student days, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec is one of only a handful of young German directors who continue unswervingly along their own paths, repeatedly seeking to give form to reality - with films that really do succeed in accompanying life along part of the way. Films which quite incidentally recount the fluctuation, radical changes and existential decisions faced by an entire generation.