Maximilian Haslberger

On the last day of the year, a dispirited work-at-home phone interpreter has her moribund life turned upside down when she answers an unexpected emergency call.

“If the ghosts can visit our time, we can visit theirs”. This freewheeling tour of German history of the 20th and 21st centuries follows a postmodern artist back to her East German village birthplace – where a discovered skeleton opens up mysteries both personal and political.

Phoebe Phaidon works as a climatologist at an institute of cybernetics which is about to be shut down. So there has to be a solution in the form of a successful evaluation. The strategy consultants now work against the student movement in a virtual reality. Turmoils start.

Queer binaries and emancipation agenda: Jochen and Sven struggle in achieving a regular sex life.

Queer binaries and emancipation agenda: Jochen and Sven struggle in achieving a regular sex life.

At first calm, even dreamy, the film takes the viewer into the quiet of the seaside and undersea landscape somewhere in Italy. They are soon shaken awake from these blissful images by footage of traces of today's global industrial world, as an increasing part of the sea is polluted by wastewater from factories, destroying the natural beauty.

The film is set in a modern day 'Berlin Republic' liberated from all irrelevancies. It's about artistic production, the creative industries and above all film and cinema - a political manifesto in feature film format. It centres on Asta, tough, hardened by theory and immaculately styled right down to the emblems on her leather jacket, with current art scene jargon flowing elegantly from her lips.