Director's Portrait:

A voluntary fire brigade uniform hangs shapelessly from Markus' shoulders, and his starched white shirt can no longer give him stability, either. His eyes closed, he is smooching to "I wanna feel real love" by Robbie Williams, swaying to and fro in the party room; he is far, far away, and it is moving to watch him. Perhaps it was dissolved in the alcohol he drank, or perhaps the intensity of the music pressed a hidden switch; whatever the case, it is there now - this huge and powerful longing, much greater than Markus the metalworker and his insignificant life - and it will soon lead him to play the central role in a tragedy.
Valeska Grisebach's village melodrama Longing is as fragile as it is objective, telling the story of a quiet young man from the Brandenburg village of Zuehlen, who genuinely loves his wife and yet wakes up with a thumping head in the bed of a waitress one day. It is the start of a double life, until his wife leaves him and he tries to shoot himself through the heart. Longing is a film of astonishing simplicity. All that it consists of is the magic of precise observation and the timid pathos that only amateur actors can bring to the cinema screen. "From the very beginning, when I was making Longing, I had the feeling that this film in particular would gain precision from collaboration with amateur actors, whose experience, knowledge and physical presence could be brought into a fictive, melodramatic story," the director says in her quiet, deep voice, searching carefully for her next words during a pause for thought. "The fact that someone that we would not normally see in the cinema appears before the camera increases our feeling that any person can actually be the melodramatic hero of a story."

The project began with detailed research. She carried out more than 200 interviews with men and women around 30, asking them how they had expected their lives to turn out when they were children, which expectations have been abandoned as a compromise with everyday life, and which are still there waiting for fulfillment. "In those conversations I got the impression that love stories in particular were often the setting for our longings. It was there that people wanted their desires to be fulfilled, for exciting things to happen, making them feel alive. It was there that it was possible to become a dramatic character, showing one's true face," Grisebach recalls, and briefly contemplates the question mark of hair that has slipped in front of her eyes.

Slowly, a story emerged from this collection of people's plans for life and love. And also from episodes she found in her own memory: "Some years ago, I was in a small village in France, in Bourgogne. I was staying with friends who lived on the village main street, and opposite to us was a smart house where a builder lived. And then one day someone told me that this married man had met another woman when he was on a business trip and had fallen in love. By chance, his wife found out and nothing was as it had been after that: his wife left him, and the man shot himself in the heart with a shotgun, although he survived." She takes a sip of coffee. "Unfortunately, I could never find out any more, but the story moved me very much. I also liked the laconic touch, the sardonic wink in that story; the fact that he was able to go on living after all. In addition, I was moved to hear that in a village where everyone is so aloof and close, someone had been able to stage his fate so powerfully and show his face so openly. In my imagination, that made him into a romantic hero."

In search of her own romantic hero, the director spent six months touring Brandenburg's villages, its shopping precincts and events organized by the voluntary fire brigade. Two months were spent rehearsing. She wanted the actors to feel at home in the story and not to learn their lines word for word. "That just ties your brain in knots and switches off common sense," Grisebach explains. After all, she is interested in the exact moment when reality and fiction collide and an ordered picture erupts into chaos.

The 38-year-old filmmaker had already worked with inexperienced actors for her first film Mein Stern, in which young people work out the complex rituals of a love affair with an enchanting honesty. That film was set in Berlin-Mitte. Since then, the capital city and Brandenburg have been her preferred backdrops, and that is although she studied in Vienna for eight years. "There came a point when I felt that I had to 'go back home' and that I ought to ask myself exactly what is meant by the concept of 'home'. Berlin, which is where I grew up, is a moving city. It has this gruff quality and at the same time it has a damaged psyche. That is incredibly exciting. The same thing applies to Brandenburg, where different eras seem to run parallel to one another. The old eastern side and the new western side - I find that very stimulating. And if you look at all the towns and villages that are slowly being deserted because of migration - places where the landscape is taking something back - Brandenburg can also be a fairy-tale forest."
Valeska Grisebach's cinema is a slow kind of film, in which observation and narration merge into one. Her art is the ability to examine an average life and its outlines beneath the magnifying glass of her film camera. To sound it out, finding the uncertainties and disruption, revealing its tragic potential. This is a cinema that fits in - in an exciting way - with films by a young generation of German directors, acclaimed as the "Berlin School" abroad, particularly in France, where they are known as the "Nouvelle Vague Allemande".

"As far as we - those who are involved - are concerned, the 'Berlin School' is a term that comes from the outside. It doesn't describe shared aesthetics so much as a friendly, pragmatic union. Perhaps the connection, as far as the content of our films is concerned, is the attempt to find an approach to reality, and thus to our own identities. And certainly the attempt, as an author, to be individual and recognizable," Grisebach sums up. After a short, thoughtful pause she adds: "And I think it is a good thing that the name 'Berlin School' ensures that we are perceived together abroad, where we would perhaps be overlooked as individuals."