Director's Portrait:

Maria Speth is one of a handful of lone wolves who have breathed life into German film in recent years by developing an independent, lively vision of film beyond the mainstream. Her graduation film at the Potsdam Academy of Film «Konrad Wolf» was already an artistic monolith capturing a very specific feeling for life, a time of indecisiveness. The main character Lynn (Sabine Timoteo) lets herself be carried from one day to the next in Berlin. She does not fulfill any expectations and drifts between two men and several jobs. Speth and cameraman Reinhold Vorschneider film the city through the perceptions of her heroine. Lynn's rhythm of life and work lead to a selective big-city feeling, the image of a city whose atmosphere and bluish light appear to be a continuation of the young woman's floating state. Again and again, we see Lynn roaming through the city shortly before it wakes or as night finally falls.

«The point was to show a certain urbanity which one doesn't necessarily associate only with Berlin,» Speth says. «Lynn often wanders through Berlin at night and at sunset. That was how those atmospheres of light and color emerged.»

Very gradually, «from day to day», a love story develops between Lynn and the Japanese exchange student Koji. For Speth, the actual fascination of this encounter was the characters' difficulties in understanding each other. «What happens when two people meet who do not speak the same language? Other forms of communication then become important: the sounds, the gestures, the mimicry. Since so little is conveyed by means of language here, it was interesting for me to tell viewers something about bodies and what distinguishes them.»

In the short film that she made during her studies, Barfuss, Speth had already worked entirely without language. This piece focuses on a young girl who comes to the city from the countryside and makes the first encounters with her own personality and sexuality. «Here too, I attempted to tell a story without dialogues and to see what happens. The next film was simply the logical continuation of that. In The Days Between, the actual moments and the constellations in which the characters moved were important to me. I was less interested in the question of why people are the way they are.»

In the course of the film, Lynn repeatedly reacts in an unpredictable way - on one occasion she even sets fire to the room when she thinks that her boyfriend is paying her insufficient attention. «Lynn,» says Speth, «attempts to try out the way she should live. She acts, sometimes aggressively, in order to find things out.» In the film, Speth is not interested in explaining Lynn's behavior. Instead, she aims to capture and hold on to a state, a feeling for life. It is a question of filming normality, the everyday quality of an existence, of observing unspectacular moments without evaluating or judging them.

In The Days Between, this feeling - the urban forlornness, waiting and drifting - certainly points beyond the protagonist. Alongside its impressive visual conception, this universality - largely independent of language - may be one of the reasons for the film's great success abroad. It was shown at festivals all over the world and won the main prizes in Créteil and in Rotterdam. «Of course,» Speth says, «it is nice when people react to your work, when they are moved, when whatever it is about life that you are attempting to demonstrate meets with understanding.»

Speth's latest project, with the working title Madonnen, also focuses on a female figure who thwarts all social expectations. It is about a mother of several children who strays from the straight and narrow. She foists her children onto her own mother, thus forcing her to give them the affection she herself was denied as a child. «I like it,» Speth says, «when a film allows you space for your own perceptions. When not everything that the viewers are meant to feel and think is already prescribed in advance.»

We can then look forward to seeing how Speth's enormous awareness of form is linked to a character who challenges viewers by refusing all common patterns of behavior and interpretation.