13/02/2007

A mother, a son, an uncle. In telling Afternoon ( Nachmittag), a modern adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull presented in the Forum section of the Berlinale, German director Angela Schanelec chose a silent house on a lake just outside Berlin.

Nothing seems to happen over three summer days: after a long absence, an actress visits her son, who lives with his ailing uncle. The son is having problems with his girlfriend, with whom he has grown up but who seems to have grown distant over time and, with the arrival of his mother, memories from the past make things even worse. An inescapable sense of guilt and the difficulty of family relationships lead to the final catastrophe, which leaves the characters abandoned to their solitude.

One of the emerging talents of young German filmmaking (the so-called “Berlin School”), Schanelec has ever since Marseille, presented in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2004, been portraying the submerged pain that leads to the breakdown of a family with profound empathy.

"Nachmittag was written with The Seagull in mind, of what it means to me. Two years pass in Chekhov, here only a few hours, three summer days, just one afternoon in which everything happens", said the director. "I thought of the mother-son relationship, and of the variety of tones of love that flow alongside personal ruin and the void. Each of us reflects the others, and we are beautiful or ugly on the basis of this".

The film is a co-production between Schanelec’s Nachmittagfilm and Zdf, and co-financed by the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH. International sales are being handled by Peripher.

(Translated from Italian)