25/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: The Austrian director follows a young woman beset by psychotic episodes, who is trying to fit the pattern of a mentally normative life

(© Manfred Werner/Tsui)

How do you deal with a world that requires normative functionality when you are struggling to fit the pattern of a mentally normative life? In his feature debut, How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Florian Pochlatko
film profile], which screened in the Berlinale’s Perspectives strand, Florian Pochlatko creates a colourful kaleidoscope of impressions and emotions. A young woman (played by Luisa-Céline Gaffron), recently released from the psychiatric ward, is trying to fit in. But fitting in comes at a high price and requires many pills. And maybe, the mentally normative world isn’t as healthy or as happy as one would assume, anyway.

Cineuropa: You portray mental illness or mental stress through different formats, gimmicks, pop culture and classic action sequences. What came to you first? The images? Or a concrete story?
Florian Pochlatko: Good question. At first, there was a very rough sketch. I work intuitively and emotionally. The first thing I decided was that Adrian Bidron would be my DoP. We may have first got to know each other through this work, but in my eyes, he was a specialist in different styles – for example, magical realism. He has a very sensitive approach to images. We then worked together to ensure this could work on this project. It was also clear to me from the start that Luisa-Céline Gaffron would play the lead role. I hadn't met her before either, but we got to know each other when I was looking for actors. I felt she was very much on an equal footing in her vision. I was also lucky to have been given the green light from funding agencies at a very early stage of the project, and then simply be allowed to work.

Mental illness and burnout are thorny topics. Did you pick them as a zeitgeist issue, or was there a private source of inspiration?
I have known and supported many people who have been affected by mental illness, including several who attempted suicide. I also have experience in a psychotherapeutic context. I have taken psychotropic drugs, and I know what they do to people. I wrote the film during a crisis – I was taking anti-depressants, and then I realised that it's almost impossible to stop taking them. Many people don't realise that. I simply wanted to make a film for these people, whom I admired for their strength.

How do you strike a balance so that you don't romanticise these illnesses and the idea that only these people can break away from the daily grind while everyone else keeps going?
That's a big danger, of course, because mental health has become such a big issue in recent years. It's also cute to have a diagnosis on your Instagram handle now. But I didn't want it to be portrayed as “cool”. I've always approached it with an open and honest seriousness.

You also filled the film to the brim with pop culture. There’s an English musician called Ned, who looks like Ed Sheeran, and Harald Krassnitzer is an investigator who is also called Moritz, like in Tatort. You have Men in Black rip-offs. Is this a personal reference or simply the over-saturated pop-cultural media world?
It all started with an attempt to create something genuine. When you listen to people who have already been in a manic or psychotic state of mind, it's something that comes close to their experience. These secondary media realities collapse, and suddenly, there are no more boundaries between the inside and the outside. Madonna suddenly appears at the side of the road, or you expect to be picked up in a helicopter. A kind of mythological world of its own develops under the influence of the mainstream. So, what might such a psychotic mythology look like for a person who was socialised in Austria? Who would pop up? There's Tom Turbo, and there's Tatort. The world feels like a satire of itself. One strange plot twist follows another, and you wonder what film you're in.