Goethe-Kino (Online - Only Available in the UK)

A dark theatre space, from the depths of which five young women resolutely emerge and line up in front of the camera. They are five women who took part in a casting for a film in 2015, together with many other women, including minors. They all would have liked to forget what they experienced and observed at this casting. They were harassed, yelled at, inappropriately touched, beaten. What's more, the director in charge used the footage from this audition for a completely different film, which the participants only found out by accident—another form of abuse and exploitation.

Director Alison Kuhn also took part in this casting. In 2019, now studying film direction at the Film University Babelberg, she decided to process her experience together with other participants of the casting on film. In the reduced space of the film school's theatre stage, they reconstruct the casting situation and talk individually about what happened, about their sense of vulnerability, their powerlessness, their confusion, their shame and their anger. For legal reasons, the director's name is never mentioned, but as Alison Kuhn puts it, her concern wasn't so much with an indictment as with "providing a case study of a structural power problem" and creating a safe space for the women, where they can “tell their story. On behalf of all people who have suffered abuse of power."

Germany 2020, colour, 80 mins. With English subtitles.

Directed by Alison Kuhn.

Alison Kuhn is a German actor, writer and director. She was born in 1995 in Saarbrücken, Germany. Kuhn graduated from drama school in Cologne and is currently living in Berlin. In 2017 she won the national award for young poetry "lyrix" and has since attended writer's workshops at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. She works as an actor and a writer in film and television while additionally studying directing at Filmuniversität Babelsberg in Potsdam. Her first feature length documentary The Case of You (2020) celebrated its world premiere at IDFA 2020. Her latest film Fluffy Tales (2021) was selected for German Film’s Next Generation Short Tiger. (Source: Festivalscope)