Sarah Jayne Portelli and Ivan Malekin’s Berlin-set drama After the Act will bow on 3 December at Vienna’s Admiral Kino, before screening on 9 December at Berlin’s underground Sputnik Kino, each followed by Q&As with the filmmakers and local leads Laura Petracco and Jacob Wolf Lefton.

Shot using an improvised approach, the film traces 24 hours in the lives of three friends as they confront the quiet wreckage of their choices, a “devastating meditation on love and intimacy” that continues Nexus Production Group’s pursuit of raw, human storytelling through unconventional techniques and emotional realism.

Critical kudos has already trickled in: Senses of Cinema’s Bill Mousoulis calls it “uniquely intimate cinema”, while IndyRed’s Ken Greaves dubs it “a savage emotional rollercoaster”. Portelli and Malekin frame this fifth improvised feature as “the culmination of an ongoing experiment: to make films that feel lived, not manufactured”, aiming for an honesty in which audiences “see themselves reflected; messy, complicated, human”.

Channelling arthouse and slow-cinema traditions, from Éric Rohmer’s observational intimacy to Hong Sang-soo’s elliptical candour and Berlin mumblecore’s lived-in immediacy, After the Act positions itself firmly within contemporary European independent cinema.