The film winning the German Licht Festival in 2020 reflects the current situation even without touching on the biography of the new Corona virus, with empty streets at the feet of the skyscrapers in Frankfurt and individuals eager to communicate.
"Live" is not a documentary that is born of the moment, but an intellectual experience that has been fermented for years at the head of the director and screenwriter Lisa Charlotte Friedrich.
Since the Coruna virus began making headlines and affecting public life, Friedrich said, "We had to accept the idea that we made a movie that looked very much like what we all live today."
This film was inspired years before the wave of terrorist attacks that struck Europe in 2015-2016, from Paris to Brussels and Bavaria.
Friedrich and her crew envisioned a world in which a repressive government prohibited crowds of people to reduce dangers from an ideological threat. "For people who live in relative safety, there is a relationship between the threat of terrorism and the virus," she said. Both "show us how fragile our world is and how connected it is ... We have to think about how we lived in the past and how we will live in the future." One of the first scenes derives from reports of the Brussels Metro bombing in March 2016, when first responders find the bodies of people attending an illegal underground party after an explosion. Returning to the real world, people returned to the streets of Berlin, and thousands gathered on May 1, a day when parties were held without controls and restrictions in the center of the Kreuzberg district. This blind challenge to authority was not in the mind of director Friedrich when she presented "Live", which revolves around two relatives planning to hold illegal parties under the noses of the authorities. "Of course, the goal of the movie is not to encourage people to gather in a stupid way and to rebel, and instead, the movie talks about the people's need for society, and this is something other than evoking conspiracy theories, such as those that motivate some protesters today," Friedrich said.
Digital spacing
Throughout the movie, the characters appear frustrated, having lost their skill in creating human communication driven by digital technologies that have failed to replace this type of communication.
"I haven't touched anyone for a long time, and I no longer even know what a human smell looks like," said one of them, crying during his interrogation.
Another rushes to persuade heroine Claire to abandon her dangerous plans, and when the video call wasn't enough, he challenged security measures to see her face to face. "People are losing these things very quickly," said Friedrich, who sees herself lucky in living with her partner and co-producer Rick Howe. The crew was able to photograph precious footage of Frankfurt's empty streets, when an area where 60,000 people lived in 2017 was evacuated, after a World War II bomb was discovered and defused.
"We wouldn't be able to photograph the area this way without cars, even at night," she joked. The bomb made what we currently live all the time possible at that time. ”
good luck
The Internet Film Festival was organized with a limited number of tickets to broadcast competing films.
Friedrich believes that technically, the film was fortunate to have reached festivals by the time it arrived. "We didn't really have to reach out to the public, we're all here. The hand of the audience is in our hand. ” With groups of cinemas reporting increasing demands from their creators to show the movie, Friedrich hopes it will be easier for her to find a distributor, as is the case for some other directors at a time when theaters are closing.
Friedrich concluded, "Not many directors have the good luck of someone going to the movies, and he says, 'I want to see this movie.'"
Empty streets of Frankfurt's skyscrapers and individuals eager to connect.