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Single Ticket
$15

One ticket for one screening.
Pre-ordering is recommended.
Find ticket links in the schedule below.

Applicable discounts:
CFI Supporter members: 30% off
CFI Cinephile members: 50% off
Cinephile PLUS members: FREE

EUFF Six-Film Pack
$65

Six tickets to use throughout the Festival.
After the ticket pack is ordered, use it to order six tickets for $0. Pre-ordering is recommended.
Find ticket links in the schedule below.

Applicable discounts:
CFI Supporter members: 30% off
CFI Cinephile members: 50% off

Order an EUFF Six-Film Pack

EUFF Pass
$250

One ticket for each screening.
After the pass is ordered, use it to order tickets for $0. Pre-ordering is recommended.
Find ticket links in the schedule below.

Applicable discounts:
CFI Supporter members: 30% off
CFI Cinephile members: 50% off

Order an EUFF Pass

Ramona

Andrea Bagney’s sparkling debut feature, largely shot in black and white in a stylistic nod to the French New Wave of the 1960s, is a romantic comedy with a difference. After living abroad for several years, Ramona and her boyfriend Nico return to Madrid where she hopes to restart her film acting career. Anxious on the evening before her first audition, Ramona walks the streets of Madrid where she encounters a charismatic older man named Bruno. They walk together and head to a bar where, over a few drinks, they talk about the state of the planet, climate change, and where the world is headed. Certainly fast friends, could they also be falling in love? It’s entirely possible, but what will really complicate the answer is Ramona’s discovery that Bruno is directing the very same film for which she’ll be auditioning. Cue the comedy, cue the drama, cue the awkwardness.

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The Man with the Answers
(Ο ανθρωπος με τις απαντησεις)

Twenty-something Victor, a former diving champion, now toils anonymously at a furniture factory and lives with his sick grandmother in a dreary seaside town. Distraught and alone after her death, he decides to spruce up her old car and drive to Germany to visit his long-estranged mother. En route, Victor meets Matthias, a talkative, inquisitive young German who persuades Victor to take him along. On the long drive north, Victor’s buttoned-down, uptight personality more than once clashes with the irrepressible, free-spirited Matthias. Soon enough, they find common emotional ground as their summer road trip takes unexpected turns into self-discovery, the meaning of family, and perhaps even love. Winner of the Audience Award at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, The Man with the Answers is the promising debut feature of Cypriot filmmaker Stelios Kammitsis.

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Io sto bene

In the late 1960s, Antonio and cousins Vito and Giuseppe leave their beloved Italy in search of employment. While his cousins head for Belgium, Antonio settles in Luxembourg, working as a bricklayer. Full of dreams, he intends only to stay a few months, make some money, and return home. Life has other plans. Years later, we encounter an elderly Antonio, recently widowed and preparing to move into a care facility. In the process, he meets Leo, a young DJ from Italy who, like his younger self, has travelled abroad seeking fame and fortune and is now facing serious life challenges. Their friendship soon enlivens Leo’s hopes for her future and gives Antonio a fresh reflection on his abiding sense of exile. Alternating between past and present, Io sto bene is a moving, bittersweet reflection on life, friendship, and time’s passage from the director of Baby(A)lone, an EUFF 2015 selection.

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Remains of the Wind
(Restos do Vento)

A powerful story about how the past shapes the present, Remains of the Wind is set in a remote village in rural Portugal. Twenty-five years ago, during the annual performance of an ancient community pagan ritual where young men torment the women, one of them, Laureano, gets too aggressive with a young girl and is viciously beaten by his peers. Flash forward to today: the now adult and still troubled Laureano has isolated himself and lives alone with his dogs. Meanwhile, two of the men involved in that altercation all those years ago, Samuel and Vitor, have also grown up in the community. When Samuel’s young son Paulo, who shows signs of being overly forceful with women, is found murdered, an investigation is launched and Laureano becomes a prime suspect.

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The Last Temptation of the Belgians
(La Dernière Tentation des Belges)

This droll dramedy revolves around Jan, a provocative artist in his late fifties who has known various degrees of success and failure with his art, with the women in his life, and with his attempts to change the world, however modestly. Marie, his only daughter, blames him for never being around while she was growing up. A part-time stripper and now mired in a deep depression, Marie is wondering if life is worth living at all and threatening to end hers. Reunited one day at this critical juncture of Marie’s life, her father resolves to try to keep her dark thoughts at bay by telling her a wealth of stories about life and love and everything in between. A tough and tender father-daughter drama, The Last Temptation of the Belgians is the third installment of notorious filmmaker-agitator Jan Bucuoy’s loosely autobiographical ‘trilogy’ of films which includes The Sexual Life of the Belgians (1994) and Camping Cosmos (1996). Unique, provocative, unforgettable.

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Yasmine's Wedding

Young and ambitious Amsterdam lawyer Yasmine, of Dutch-Moroccan heritage, is struggling to navigate her job, her life, and her multiple cultural identities. Brilliant and successful, she is rapidly climbing the career ladder at a prestigious law firm, but her rather conservative family appears only interested in one thing: when is she getting married? Craving the approval of both her parents and the local Moroccan community, Yasmine resolves to try to tie the knot as soon as possible. But how can you find your one true love? At once a sprightly romantic comedy and an astute comment on the many challenges faced by children of first-generation immigrants, Yasmine’s Wedding is a winning combination of humour, romance, and social observation, featuring a breakout performance by the luminous Soumaya Ahouaoui.

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Freestyle
(En roue libre)

There’s anxiety, and then there’s anxiety à la Louise! In this lively, absurdist comedy, Louise, who is just coming out of a painful separation and a run of bad luck, finally gives up at the sight of a parking ticket. After a desperate hunt to find a new spot, she parks the car and swings open the door, but discovers she cannot get out. With no physical barrier confining her, she comes to the stark and deeply unsettling realization that the only thing preventing her from leaving the car is herself! Panicked and confused, she is jolted out of her distracted state by a stranger suddenly breaking into her car. With Louise stuck and the carjacker desperate to get to the south coast of France, the two decide to surrender to this bizarre fate and embark on an unexpected road trip—and a just as unexpected (and unlikely) friendship. Buckle up.

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Riders
(Jezdeca)

Set in the spring of 1999, Dominik Mencej’s magic realist road movie (an homage to Dennis Hopper’s classic Easy Rider) revolves around best friends and biker wannabes Tomaž and Anton. They drive around their village on mopeds and dream of escape. Tomaž has the reputation of a reliable, honest hard worker, while Anton is more rebellious, and constantly in trouble. They decide to transform their motorbikes into choppers and take a weekend trip to Ljubljana to visit Anton’s girlfriend. Along the way they pick up a runaway nun and encounter a wise old biker, with whom they unexpectedly travel to the coast and onward to Croatia—perhaps all the way to Međugorje, a mysterious, magical place where miracles are rumoured to happen. By turns amusing, romantic, and offbeat, Riders turns out to be the long, strange trip of a lifetime.

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A Viper's Pit
(Is-Sriep Reġgħu Saru Velenużi)

Political intrigue and family reckoning collide in this taut drama-thriller adapted from Maltese author Alex Vella Gera’s prize-winning novel. Set across two time periods, the film concerns a (fictional) 1984 assassination attempt on the prime minister of Malta by a family man enlisted into a fundamentalist group, and the life of his now adult son Noel, in 2012, still haunted by the spectre of his vanished father. When Noel returns to Malta for his mother’s funeral, a former associate of his father, who holds answers to unresolved questions, starts Noel down the same treacherous path that corrupted his old man. Bonnici’s engrossing picture, “Malta’s first political thriller” (Times of Malta), was financed by the National Book Council of Malta through an initiative to promote Maltese literature on film.

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Miss Viborg

Former beauty queen and now senior citizen Solvej (in a masterful performance by veteran actress Ragnahild Kaasgaard) lives alone with her dog in a social housing area on the outskirts of the provincial Danish town of Viborg. Day after day, when not reminiscing over old love letters from her beauty queen past, she roams around on her scooter dealing her prescription drugs to make money, all the while dreaming of an idyllic world outside Viborg she can escape to someday. When unforeseen circumstances bring Kate, her neighbour’s 17-year-old rebellious daughter, into her life, an unlikely friendship begins to form between these two women of different generations. Both feel like outsiders, but together they just might be able to figure their lives out and find a positive path into the future. Marianne Blicher’s entertaining and observant first feature is a witty, insightful comedy about friendship and the tenacity of hope. A lively, entertaining film, Miss Viborg was a hit at the 2023 Glasgow Film Festival.

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Director Maria Douza will be in attendance for a Q&A after the screening.

Listen
(Άκουσε με)

Raised by her grandmother after her mother died when she was six, 16-year-old Valmira is forced to leave Athens when her grandmother passes away. She is sent to a faraway Greek island to be with her father and his new family, leaving behind her beloved special school for deaf children. Her Bulgarian stepmother and her stepbrother Ari are not exactly happy to have her; nor is her estranged father. If all this wasn’t enough, her new schoolmates are also hardly welcoming. To cope with her home and school situations, Valmira opts to withdraw into the familiar isolation of her deafness. All this changes when she meets Marios, a local boy with lots of affection for her but rather dubious, even dangerous, political views. As their love story unfolds, Valmira must confront her past, present, and possible future in daring new ways. An impressive second feature by promising newcomer Maria Douza, Listen is making its Canadian premiere at the EUFF 2023.

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Runner
(Bėgikė)

Marija is devoted to her troubled boyfriend Vytas, a brilliant PhD candidate who has previously been hospitalized for bipolar disorder. Early one morning, Vytas experiences a psychotic episode and suddenly goes missing. In this pulse-pounding thriller, Marija will spend the next 24 hours hurtling back and forth across Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. Desperate to find him before he hurts himself or someone else, Marija must also deal with her own precarious medical condition and repeated calls from her mother ordering her to see a doctor. “An 87-minute-long anxiety attack masquerading as a movie—but in a good way—Lithuanian filmmaker Andrius Blaževičius’s sophomore feature is a kinetic portrayal of an extraordinary young woman paradoxically trapped at a psychological impasse … For all its adrenalized, blood-rush rhythms, Runner [is] remarkably humane” (Jessica Kiang, Variety). Winner of the Best Baltic Film Award at the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn and Best Film at the Riga International Film Festival.

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Double Blind

In this gripping, inventive thriller-horror genre film, seven strangers enroll in a routine drug trial at a pharmaceutical facility but soon discover an unexpected side effect - they are unable to fall asleep. Concerned for her patients’ safety, the supervising Doctor advises the pharmaceutical representatives to stop the trial, though they are more interested in the drug’s potential on the market than the safety of some “lab rats.” As the drug’s effects finally begin to diminish and the participants grow tired, they realize that if they fall asleep, they will die. Chaos ensues when the facility suddenly goes into lockdown, and the participants must fight to stay awake for another 24 hours, after already being awake for almost five days straight.

Elfriede Jelinek: Language Unleashed
(Elfriede Jelinek - Die Sprache von der Leine lassen)

Renowned Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek has been called a lot of things: wunderkind, scandalous author, traitor to the fatherland, feminist, fashion-lover, communist, pessimist, language terrorist, rebel, enfant terrible, brilliant, vulnerable, and rebellious. She is also a Nobel laureate. This is an absorbing, complex, formally freewheeling portrait of Elfriede Jelinek, who in 2004 became the first Austrian author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Concentrating on her artistic, playful, even iconoclastic approach to language, Language Unleashed reveals her extraordinary life story, in her own words, via a montage of archive material with voiceovers and interviews, archival footage, and home movies. Exploring the incendiary collisions between literary aesthetics and politics, the documentary also examines how Jelinek’s work unflinching confronts and uncovers the social, historical, and political contradictions of contemporary Austria. Catherine Müller’s is an intelligent, inventive documentary worthy of its intelligent, inventive subject.

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Mother
(Майка)

Elena is a talented young theatre director who has already made a name for herself in the demanding and competitive artistic world of Sofia. Beyond her successful theatrical career, she dreams of having a child with her partner, Leon. Her future looks bright until Elena slowly realizes that she may not be able to conceive. In the midst of this existential crisis, however, Elena receives an invitation that will change everything. Invited to Kenya to teach acting and various performing arts in an orphanage, Maria soon finds herself in an incredibly impoverished part of Africa. The poverty is real, but, as she learns, so too is her students' energy and vast potential. Far from the sophisticated urban circles of Sofia, Elena’s experience forces her to reconsider everything she thought she wanted for herself and her future. An astute drama about finding new perspectives on life, Mother is an emotionally powerful tale of one woman’s journey to enlightenment.

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Rap and Reindeer
(Revontulten räppäri)

This engaging, eccentric documentary follows the young, ambitious 18-year-old Sámi rapper phenom Mihkku Laiti, who lives in the northernmost corner of Sámiland. Following Mihkku on his journey towards a career as a musician and his unlikely rise to stardom, this is a truly unique coming-of-age story. In addition to charming the crowd at the Talent Finland competition and proudly wearing the traditional Sámi clothing he has styled himself, rapping in Sámi harmonies, and designing his own branding on his computer, Mihkku is also a master of the time-honoured and demanding skill of herding reindeer. In the accelerated swirl of 21st-century media-saturated modernity, Mihkku sees his Sámi roots and the Sámi language as his greatest strengths. The future that lies before him is uncertain, though, as he must ponder whether to follow in his father’s footsteps or to go hard after his dream to become an international rap star.

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107 Mothers
(Cenzorka)

Winner of Best Screenplay in Venice’s 2021 Horizons program, the latest from Slovak documentarian Peter Kerekes (whose 66 Seasons played EUFF 2004) is a poignant docufiction hybrid that glimpses the difficult lives of imprisoned new mothers in southern Ukraine. Set in an Odessa women’s correctional facility, 107 Mothers takes as its factual premise the abbreviated window for incarcerated mothers to care for and bond with their children; when a child turns three, they are transferred to another guardian or, more commonly, to a state-run orphanage. This heartrending countdown propels Kerekes’s penetrating film, which follows new inmate Lesya (Maryna Klimova), sentenced to seven years for murdering her newborn’s father, as she navigates first-time motherhood behind bars. The work’s highly mannered aesthetic belies its real-life subjects, who appear in the film as versions of themselves and whose stories inform the stirring narrative. 107 Mothers was Slovakia’s official submission to last year’s Oscars.

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Soviet Milk
(Mātes piens)

Based on the international bestselling novel by renowned Latvian author Nora Ikstena, Soviet Milk is a powerful mother-daughter drama set in the era of the Soviet occupation of Latvia. Unfolding between 1945 and 1989, the film revolves around the life of Astra, a promising doctor who loses everything due to her opposition to the totalitarian Soviet regime: her career, her love for life, and even her maternal instinct to breastfeed her baby. “I didn’t want to live and I didn’t want her to drink milk from a mother who doesn’t want to live.” As the years of struggle go by, her now grown-up daughter becomes her lifeline, trying to ease Astra’s depression and help her learn to live under the Soviet regime—a regime whose collapse may be on the horizon. An inspiring tale of love and loyalty.

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Mikado
(Marocco)

The title of this intricately constructed, deftly directed drama refers to the game of pick-up sticks, in which one wrong move can create havoc. In Emanuel Pârvu’s clever sophomore feature, everything revolves around a necklace given as a birthday present to teenager Magda by her father Cristi. When Magda visits a hospital where her boyfriend, an aspiring magician, is doing tricks for young patients, she gives the necklace as a gift to a child who shares her birthday. Meanwhile, Cristi, the quintessential controlling parent, starts wondering why the necklace has disappeared, not knowing of Magda’s kind gesture. Soon he is accusing a nurse of theft, insisting that she be fired, and threatening to scuttle a hospital fundraiser. As the misunderstandings mount, events begin to spiral out of control as Cristi grows ever more unreasonable.

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Carbide
(Garbura)

Earning a buzzy spot in San Sebastián’s New Directors platform, the debut feature of writer-director Josip Žuvan sets a comic tale of childhood friendship and family feuding against a Christmas backdrop in coastal Croatia. Preteens Nikola and Antonio (Franko Floigl and Mauro Ercegović Gracin) are next-door neighbours and best friends. Bored and on winter holiday in their ho-hum provincial suburb, they aspire to internet fame by YouTubing destruction delivered by homemade pyrotechnics. The boys’ families, meanwhile, engage in their own form of fireworks: a fiery dispute over an innocuous water-drainage problem stands in for a deeper hurt dating back decades. Deftly combining coming-of-age tropes with ruminations on inherited conflict and Croatian society at the crossroads of modernity, Žuvan’s incisive film is the latest in a wave of acclaimed Croatian pictures earning festival attention in recent years.

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Till the End of the Night
(Bis ans Ende der Nacht)

The latest from Berlin School genre deconstructor Christoph Hochhäusler takes the shape of a noirish psycho-thriller to interrogate thorny themes of gender, sexuality, and identity performance. A main-slate competitor at this year’s Berlinale (and winner of Best Supporting Performance for Thea Ehre’s astonishing turn), Till the End of the Night plunges the viewer into Frankfurt’s nocturnal underworld where trans convict Leni (Ehre, herself trans), in exchange for parole, assumes the role of girlfriend to straight-playing cop Robert (Timocin Ziegler) to infiltrate a drug trafficking network run by her former boss. That Robert was Leni’s lover before she transitioned—and that he still holds a flame for her, destabilizing his sexual identity—further complicates the deep-cover operation. Part pulpy policier, part multilayered romance, Hochhäusler’s polarizing sixth feature summons the work of forefather R.W. Fassbinder in its queering of genre fare and tenor of doomed romanticism.

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Kalev

Ove Musting’s rousing sports drama, Estonia’s 2022 Best Picture winner and submission to the 95th Oscars, relates a fascinating chapter of the country’s Soviet past, in which a basketball team drew the ire, then admiration, of a nation poised for liberation. Set during the leadup to Soviet dissolution, Kalev concerns Estonia’s titular basketball team and its controversial decision, in the summer of 1990, to compete in the USSR championship despite the country’s recent inroads toward regaining independence. When Estonia unexpectedly wins its way to the finals, the team becomes a rallying point for resistance to Soviet oppression. “A classic underdog tale based on a true story, Kalev celebrates the achievements of a national basketball team who, despite the political turmoil surrounding them, and their unpopularity, went on to defy the odds and find glory” (Europa! Europa Film Festival).

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Semmelweis

This handsome historical drama is set in Vienna in 1847 and based on a true story. It revolves around Ignác Semmelweis, a short-tempered, passionate Hungarian doctor who struggles to find a cure for a mysterious fever that is killing mothers and babies in the hospital. His considerable ambition and his research method soon draw the disfavour of his superiors, who order him to stop. They even enlist a young midwife named Emma to secretly spy on him. After a turbulent first encounter, the relationship between Semmelweis and Emma grows into something more than merely professional. As the fever spreads and with half his peers discrediting him, Semmelweis carries on his fight to discover a cure, with Emma by his side. Meanwhile, outside the hospital walls, a social powder keg of political and revolutionary forces is about to explode.

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The Spring of My Life
(La primavera della mia vita)

Zavvo Nicolosi’s feature debut is a lively, engaging, often hilarious road movie starring popular Sicilian singers Colapesce and Dimartino (whose music videos Nicolosi directs). The film is the fictional story of two friends who share a certain musical past (very meta!) as they embark on an unusual journey to Sicily. As they travel across the legendary island and its villages, towns, and cities, not to mention the volcanic Mount Etna, they have odd, absurdist encounters with decidedly eccentric characters. Influenced by the road movies of Wim Wenders and Aki Kaurismäki, with nods to Wes Anderson’s whimsical humour, The Spring of My Life is a colourful cinematic and musical confection—a trip to Sicily you won’t soon forget.

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The Bohemian
(Il Boemo)

Award-winning director Petr Vaclav’s lush, visually gorgeous historical drama is a stirring biopic of the 18th-century Czech composer Josef Mysliveček. The film chronicles his struggles and triumphs as an outsider trying desperately to make it as an opera composer in cut-throat, cosmopolitan Venice. Mysliveček is a man of talent but also possesses considerable charm, and he’s not above using his multiple sexual conquests to advance his progress from court to court. After one affair with a well-connected woman, he gets his chance: a commission to write an opera for the Teatro di San Carlo, Europe’s largest opera house at the time. But will his work be accepted? Selected as the Czech Republic’s candidate for Best International Feature to the 95th Academy Awards.

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This screening is a fundraiser. Proceeds from this screening will benefit the Maple Hope Foundation, a Canadian not-for-profit organization committed to helping people suffering from the war in Ukraine.

Luxembourg, Luxembourg

The EUFF continues to stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. For this year’s fundraiser screening, we are proud to present Antonio Lukich’s delightfully droll comedy Luxembourg, Luxembourg. When twin brothers Kolya and Vasya learn that their long-absent father is gravely ill and living in Luxembourg, they set out on a pan-European journey from Ukraine to visit him one last time. Having left them when they were children, the father is regarded differently by the siblings: Kolya considers him to be something of a romantic hero figure, while Vasya thinks he’s nothing but a deadbeat dad. Their journey is one thing; the reunion is quite another. “In the sincerity of its sentimentality and its humane, universal observations … the movie not only earns us the right to laugh during a period of suffering and conflict, it makes sharing in the warmth of its sweet-natured humor seem like a vital, revivifying act of resistance” (Jessica Kiang, Variety).

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Leave No Traces
(Zeby nie bylo sladów)

Set in Poland in 1983 and based on actual events, Leave No Traces concerns the case of Grzegorz Przemyk, a high school student beaten to death by authorities in a Warsaw police station. In order to prevent news of this incident from reaching the public, the government moves quickly to cover it up. Consequently, Jurek, a close friend of Grzegorz and the only eyewitness to the beating becomes the number one enemy of the state. Soon the regime invokes its entire power and security apparatus—the secret service, militia, the media, and the courts—to intimidate into silence Jurek and others close to the case, including his parents and Grzegorz’s mother. Jurek must fight to preserve the truth, but the odds are stacked against him. Matuszyński’s powerful film debuted in competition at the 2021 Venice Film Festival.

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Comedy Queen

A 13-year-old girl sets her sights on comedy glory in gifted Swedish director Sanna Lenken’s family crowd-pleaser, winner of Best Film in the Berlinale’s 2022 Generation Kplus section. Still processing the suicide of her mother, young Sasha (Sigrid Johnson) develops a survival plan to prevent a similar fate from befalling her: no books, no long hair, no caring for living things—no resembling her mom and the life she couldn’t cope with. The next item on Sasha’s checklist is to make her father, overwhelmed by grief, laugh again. The solution: limber up those funny bones and hit the stand-up stage! “Based on an acclaimed children’s book by psychologist and author Jenny Jägerfeld, Lenken’s screen adaptation expertly treads the fine line between the spunky and the brittle, at times managing to combine the two to gripping effect” (Jan Lumholdt, Cineuropa).

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