20/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Jan Eilhardt stages a queer confrontation with sometimes hostile, sometimes freeing encounters that emerge from ignorant, insular communities

“Back to the country, you like it risky / That spells violence, often thick and fast,” goes a song in the world-premiering Berlinale Forum entry Janine Moves to the Country [+see also:
trailer
film profile], suggesting the darker themes lurking beneath its playful exterior. Written and directed by Berlin-based experimental filmmaker Jan Eilhardt, Janine Moves to the Country is branded as an autobiographically inspired work – and it feels like a quintessential Berlinale Forum pick in a double whammy of being tonally off-kilter and substantively metatextual.

With a coy smile and dark-auburn hair, Janine (Eilhardt, credited in this role as Janine Lear) resolves to leave Berlin and move to the countryside in light of her moustachioed partner Pierre's (Pierre Emö) asthma. The couple rents a home from a lady (Kathrin Angerer) who lives next door with her two adult sons, Peter (Maximilian Brauer) and Enrico (Adrian Wenzel), the latter of whom must be cared for closely as he has an intellectual disability. Soon, Janine learns that nearly everything and everyone in the village seems to be hostile, except for Peter, who develops an odd fascination for Janine, watching her through the window across the lawn. As Janine enters his life, she facilitates Peter’s growing curiosity while he goes on his own journey of discovery, taking a brief tour into erotic territory in the film’s middle section.

While just over an hour long, this quietly radical, Berlin-homegrown production comes together as larger than the sum of its scrappy and low-budget parts, even if the work’s more artificial elements detract from its overall intent. With flatly lit indoor sets and occasionally awkward staging, some scenes almost feel as if they were drawn from reality television or sitcoms. However, DoP Irene Cruz’s camera feels fluid and intimately close at just the right moments. The sometimes cheeky, sometimes eerie, minor-keyed harpsichord score draws from famous Baroque- and Romantic-era piano works (JS Bach, Camille Saint-Saëns), and frames the village as an alienating place.

Combining fictional footage with archival video and photos, the film unfolds as an exploration of queer, trans and gender non-conforming confrontations with past traumatic or antagonistic environments that hide something beneath the surface. Eilhardt frames Janine as if she were reflecting on something beyond the story and screen, including histories of queer shame while both in the closet and out of it. The autobiographical element churns up more reflexive thoughts about the life of the filmmaker, who began dressing as a woman and going by “Janine” during his teenage years. And with Janine’s presence comes an even greater impact beyond just that of exploration: the impact on Peter’s life, representing the importance of exposure to, and engagement with, others outside of one’s insular community.

Janine Moves to the Country is a German production by Eilhardt Productions. Its world sales are up for grabs.