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“In LULLABY director Magdalena Chmielewska shows a great wild inventiveness and reveals a clear hand writing.”
Max Ophüls Preis Jury’s statement
directed by Magdalena Chmielewska
cinematography by Manuel Prett
written by Magdalena Chmielewska & Andreas Schiessler
produced by Saskia Arth
edited by Luzia Johow
as Eva Magdalena Zak
Seventeen-year-old Eva simply cannot sleep. In an Austrian province, where she lives with her father, her insomnia has become an unbearable interplay between melancholy and martyrdom. In her desperate search for sleep Eva tries to stay the night at other peoples houses where she watches others while sleeping. But how long can this last? The neighbors are becoming impatient. Same with Eva’s fencing partner and best friend Max: despite their friendship, he shuts his door to Eva.
In one of her interviews, Greta Thunberg says that long before her first climate strike, her anxiety about the world she lives in took various forms that were more of an implosion than an explosion. She suffered from bulimia, her repressed potential expressed itself in panic attacks, and was directed against herself for a long time. My main character has reached a similar point in her life: Eva lost her capacity to sleep and at night she desperately wanders like a ghost through a world that takes on uncanny features and no longer seems familiar and safe. Eva’s mysterious illness takes us to the backside of normal life letting us access the eeriness of all of us.