Presented in the Locarno Film Festival’s Cineasti del Presente competition, German director Willy Hans’s first feature film should be approached as a sensory experience, with the audience allowing themselves to surrender to the slow rhythm that we lose on becoming adults. Shot almost exclusively on the banks of a stream hidden in the thick of a forest, Skill Issue [+lee también:
entrevista: Willy Hans
ficha de la película] depicts the lethargy characterising the day-to-day lives of a group of youngsters who meet to spend their days diving in the river, whispering words, and indulging in barely exchanged glances which can change entire lives.

The film’s original title, Der Fleck, could be translated as “the spot”, as in the spot in the forest where the youngsters take refuge, sharing secrets known only to them, but also as in the spot of blood left on the shirt of the protagonist, Simon (Leo Konrad Kuhn), which sets off his wanderings with mysterious character Maria (Alva Schäfer). But the English version of the title, Skill Issue, is equally pertinent because it highlights another central feature of the film: the protagonists’ inability to relate to one another or to communicate, as if revealing something of themselves above a superficial level is a risk no-one is willing to take.

What interests the director here isn’t so much telling an extraordinary story as depicting the banality of these teenage days which pass by so lazily. The approach he takes towards the group of youngsters inhabiting his film is precise and empathic, as if every single one of their movements were a ritual and every single look had the power to transport us beyond reality to a land where everything is still possible. There are many films which focus on the excesses of adolescence and on the violence which often goes hand in hand with this particular time in our lives, but there aren’t many which try to show it for what it is: lethargic, full of conflict and terribly ordinary, as is shown in Skill Issue. Alert to the finer details, to the natural world surrounding these young people and to the potential of romantic encounters which never actually amount to anything, the audience is forced to surrender to the film’s slow and frustrating pace - much like that of adolescence – and to accept the fact that it doesn’t understand or appreciate everything it’s seeing. As if a succession of missed opportunities, the film underlines the characters’ need - which is difficult to articulate but which is felt by each of them - to share their worries. It’s interesting, in this sense, that the two protagonists, Simon and Maria, only ever meet on a mobile phone screen through a hastily-snapped selfie, which becomes incredibly precious. And it’s also interest that, with the pair being unable to make contact with one another in any other world, the bottle of water they share throughout the film becomes a totemic and symbolic object of their encounter.

A drama without any drama, as the director himself describes it, Skill Issue is a film to be savoured differently, whilst trying to reconnect with the teenager each of us once was.

Skill Issue was produced by Fünferfilm in co-production with 8horses.