Middle of Beyond

Jack Santos is a retired detective who is out to punish the men responsible for the murder of his mother, wife, and daughter.

The “story” can be reduced to three structural elements: a man, a woman, a gun. All the narrative possibilities that could occur in this situation are shifted through in the film’s 7 minute, 50 second span, the actors reciting their dialogue in a deadpan monotone that markedly contrasts with the melodramatic flavor of the words they are speaking, thus highlighting the artificiality of the filmic situation and exposing its constructedness—the very thing that mainstream cinemas typically strive to conceal.

With simple means, Keren Cytter stages a Shakespearean drama in a stripped contemporary Berlin apartment. Mortality and decay, in connection with love, are themes of all times. The motif is simple: a 42-year-old woman is confronted by her mirror image with the fact that she’s not sixteen anymore, she is being rejected by her crush and has no eyes for the man who loves her.

Chilling as the stuff of existential tragedy. Ex-lover Alex becomes a mini drone, the new lover is a stuntman; Timur can’t escape his mother and his drug problem, nor can Nicole her father’s ashes. An urban indie chamber drama with delicate synth sounds.

Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism.