Due to an actor, the life of the documentary filmmaker is thrown into existential turmoil: While for him everything in life is a game, she still firmly believes in reality.
When she begins to document their joint encounter, however, the initial fascination is already over: between closeness and distance, the two protagonists sometimes repel, sometimes attract each other.
Their triangular relationship with the camera and the sound device resembles a power struggle in the joint struggle for interpretive sovereignty: She wants him to show himself. He takes off his clothes.
The naked genius with his self-exhibition pose finally appears to her as the man who is everyone: if he can be everyone, he is at the same time no one. Thus the filmmaker only supposedly fails in her attempt to look behind the mask - because the coat is empty.
Fiction appears to her as a last resort.
With the passage of time, the director sorts out her different approaches and in the process - partly ironically, partly accusingly - comes to terms with herself. In the process, she relates herself in the montage to other films that deal with the relationship between the showing and the shown: Another distancing strategy?

"The magnificent black and white images guide the eye from the surfaces to the details, whose meaning the director probes and questions in her subjective, tentative voiceover. The film preserves the rawness of unfinished reflections without getting mired in vagueness. Step by step, the honest assessment of a desire is achieved; a desire which could function only in the delicate balance between attraction and repulsion and from which Katharina Pethke frees herself by adopting a position of artistic distance. Her sometimes self-mocking commentary is supported by dramatic guitar riffs (provided by Hochmair’s band project “Die Elektrohand Gottes”) and underpinned by filmic references, all of which revolve around the making of images and the relationship between reality and imagination."
by Luc-Carolin Ziemann

Documentary
65 minutes | Germany 2021

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WHO

script & direction KATHARINA PETHKE camera KATHARINA PETHKE, ERIC BOSSALLER sound recording TIMO SELENGIA, PHILIPP HOCHMAIR editing KATHARINA PETHKE colors CHRISTOPH ROHRSCHEIDT sound design & sound mix CLEMENS ENDREß music DIE ELEKTROHAND GOTTES subtitles MAYA CONNORS production KATHARINA PETHKE, FÜNFERFILM UG

funded by MOIN FILMFÖRDERUNG HAMBURG SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN

SCREENINGS

DOK Leipzig, Germany 2021
Crossing Europe, Austria 2022
Doc Aviv, Israel 2022
Dokka Karlsruhe, Germany 2022
Nonfiktionale, Germany 2022
Filmkunstwochen München, Germany 2022
Diagonale Graz (1st price), Austria 2023