Play Video

HEAVEN’S MEADOW

AUSTRIA 2018
“An outstanding work of violent, penetrating fantasy and undeniable urgency!

Desist film

“A visually strong and remarkable film.” 
Jessica Hausner

AWARDS

CREDITS

directed by Magdalena Chmielewska
cinematography by Manuel Prett
written by Magdalena Chmielewska & Andreas Schiessler
produced by Yana Eresina
as Maya Maria Spanring

SYNOPIS

It is night in Heaven’s Meadow, on the outskirts of Vienna. Injured and barefoot, Maya runs back home. Next day she reports the incident of the prior evening. The official statement: no traces of semen, but internal injuries. Maya takes off to Italy to see Daniel. She wants to regain control of her life. But instead, she keeps floating through the world like an unanchored island.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Maya struggles internally with the traumatisation she has experienced through the experience of violence, at the same time she takes steps to defend herself on different levels against being a victim. The abused body does not collapse, Maya tries to reinvent herself intuitively, she tries all to regain her dignity. We try to get close to Maya in order to mirror her emotional world and yet consciously “fail” with this intention. In this way a closeness goes hand in hand with a temporal distance thus mirroring the ambivalence of the character and the state she is in. In order to be able to truthfully depict character’s journey the narrative constantly draws a state of suspension – between trauma and dream, memory and repression, truth and lie, closeness and distance, control and letting oneself drift – in which Maya drives through the world like a decoupled island longingly, intuitively and sensually.