Veronika Hafner’s Obhut [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Veronika Hafner
ficha de la película] had its world premiere in the Feature Film Competition of the 2025 Zurich Film Festival and follows a young man, Lukas (Jonas Holdenrieder), who resolves to reveal his attraction to young girls to his trusted older sister – who has a daughter. The topic of paedophilia, highly stigmatised to even begin to talk about, is weighty, but Hafner is well prepared. In parallel, she works as a child and youth psychotherapist in Munich, lending her an incredibly unique perspective.

At the festival, Cineuropa spoke with her to learn about her highly informed approach to what is largely considered a taboo topic, the ways she sought to demystify the subject and her refusal to create images that might unintentionally undermine the film.

Cineuropa: Given the subject of Obhut, it's hard to ignore the fact that you wear two hats: you’re a filmmaker, but you are also a practising psychotherapist for children and youth, with a focus on behavioural therapy. How does your clinical work play a role in your creative life?
Veronika Hafner: I never know how to answer this question, because I could never know how I would be as a person [without doing both things]. I completed training to specialise in the treatment of paedophilia as well. One might think that treating children and youth might not include that, but sexual preference is quite stable from puberty. Treating juveniles can also mean treating paedophile patients. Even for many psychologists, it’s a difficult subject. Before I did my training, I had quite a simple and stereotyped view. Through stories I heard from patients and my experiences, and with [the ability to create something for the screen], I wanted to do something to share this with society as well.

In that way, do you see your film as one originating from the impulse of social activism? For an audience who perhaps doesn’t know anything about the subject, how are you hoping a viewer will take the film?
On one hand, there’s definitely the motivation from me for people to think differently about it than they did before, but on the other hand, it’s just the story of one person, of Lukas. It's just another example standing next to maybe a set of quite stereotyped stories, of which we know many. The character of Lukas can’t stand for all paedophilic people. In the end, I want to touch people on a very personal level as well.

Did you ever consider presenting the subject through other forms like documentary film, or even other mediums like literature or installations? Or did the seed for this project start as a fiction film?
It started when I read the story of one person, and it was just his experience of how he “came out” [as a paedophile], and what he said turned so much into a drama. I was digging so deep into his story that it felt like a movie. As I went deeper into his and other stories, the idea came up that I wanted to tell these stories, or one of them. You have so many movies where people are just coming out because they are found out. I had this thought instead: what if people came out on their own and of their own free will? It’s actually not as uncommon as you’d think. In therapeutic programmes, 40%-50% of participants come out to one of their family members. Calling this a utopia would [be a stretch], but what if we were in a society where you could come out like that, and where would it take us?

For the main adult characters, you use a lot of close-up cinematography, particularly with Jonas’s character of Lukas. The children often remain quite far from the camera, and you deliberately distance us from even the suggestion of sexual content, such as by only using audio for the character of Cleo, the child influencer.
We wanted to be quite documentary-like in the visuals so as not to act like we were above the story and to let the story speak for itself. We used this to also get people closer to the narrative, so you could watch this and think, “Okay, this could be anywhere; this could happen next door.” The more fictionalised the pictures are, the more it might be easier to create a distance and make people think, “Oh, it’s just a movie.” We didn’t want to make it that easy for the audience. That’s why we chose this concept.

While filming, there was the big question of how we could show children in a way that wouldn’t reproduce what we were criticising. And we really tried to avoid producing material that would create erotic images. That’s one of the reasons why we didn’t get so close to the children.