West

Still from West

Friday, 06 November 2015: West

Friday, 06 November 2015, 20:00

Venue: (see Locations and Tickets for further details)

Programme category: Forest Row Film Society

Director: Christian Schwochow, Germany 2014, 102 mins, 15

“Intelligently scripted by Heide Schwochow (the director’s mother) and resting on Triebel’s finely nuanced performance, this offers a low-key counterpoint to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning The Lives of Others, and is intriguing on personal and political levels.” Mark Kermode The Observer

A woman, whose boyfriend is mysteriously killed in an accident, flees East Berlin with her son in the late 70s. In a refugee transit camp in West Berlin they meet the same Kafkaesque bureaucracy as in the east. A tense drama about survival in a climate of paranoia and psychological oppression.

“Schwochow’s intimate, handheld camerawork often feels like surveillance, which transforms mundane events into the menacing moments of a psychological thriller” Village Voice

Further reading

  1. The Guardian
  2. The Independent
  3. Empire Magazine
  4. Slant Magazine

Trailer