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Ann-Kristin Reyels • Director

Don’t take away the characters’ mystery

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- German director Ann-Kristin Reyels (Formentera) makes quiet films. She is a detailed observer of interpersonal vibes and get her audience to observe as well

Ann-Kristin Reyels • Director

Ann-Kristin Reyels was sitting at het kitchen table in Berlin’s Kreuzberg districy when we met on a summer morning. The Berlin wall used to be just a few steps from the door. It is one of the rougher corners of this “in” district, where tourists rarely stray. The sounds of the city could be heard from the kitchen? A white cloth was hanging like a curtain emanated from the room. It is fitting that we decided to meet here and not in some busy café.

Ann-Kristin Reyels makes quiet films. She is a detailed observer of interpersonal vibes and get her audience to observe as well. Reyels dissects human relationships. In dialogues that leave lot of space, she gets to the core of every mood swing of her characters. She did that in Hounds [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, her film debut, which has received numerous awards. With laconic humour, the film tells the story of a teenage boy whose parents separate and he move with his father from the city to the village, where the obstinate villagers won’t talk to them. And her next film, Formentera [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ann-Kristin Reyels
film profile
]
, is about a young couple that is shocked at how they have apparently gotten caught up in the routines of a nuclear family, so they leave their daughter at home and go on vacation in a hippie commune on the island of Formentera.

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Reyels doesn’t need a lot of words. “I like films that have been distilled down to their essence. I find it more interesting to see what happens in the face of a character. Or what doesn’t. I don’t need it to be illustrated by the text,” she said. If there is one trap that she wants to avoid when making films, then this is it: “Telling it all. I am afraid of taking away a character’s mystery. Sometimes you simply write things down, and when you read it afterwards you think, ‘Oh my God! It’s been explained a hundred times over!’”

Reyels has a great sensibility for the actors who share and can act out her idea of reduction. “I like to break up a scenes into a few long shots. A single shot that lasts two minutes can really have an incredible strength. For a feature film that is very long. It is a challenge to give a scene its dramatic tension not through editing but through the acting,” said Rayels.

In order to achieve that she takes the time to work through the script very precisely with the actors prior to the shoot. “For me, a script is a mass that you work with, which you can move. In Formentera we often put the actors in real situations that were not staged. We discussed the scene in detail beforehand. They knew what they had to do. And then we watched what happened. This sometimes gives rise to surprising moments, which makes a scene interesting.”

Reyels’ name quickly made the rounds in the German film scene. Hounds celebrated its premiere at the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival in 2007, as did her next film, Formentera, in 2012. That attracted the attention of the film people outside of Germany. “I had the feeling that the audience in France, for example, accepted the story more for what it was than was the case in Germany,” she said. Whereas in Germany she is often asked why she wanted to tell this specific story, the audience in France was more interested in how she went about it, for instance how much of the dialogue as improvised.

While Reyels was talking, the phone on the kitchen table rang. The calls lasted only a few seconds. She climbed onto the window sill and threw a cap for the youngest of her two sons down to her husband, who was sitting there three floors below in the court yard. When she returned to the table I thought abou how many words had been said since the telephone rang. Barely three. “Just a sec.” The scene could have been from one of her films.

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