Everyone Else

Director: Maren Ade

2009 / 119min / 35mm

Before the breakthrough of Ade’s 2016 Toni Erdmann, Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear-winner Everyone Else established the director as a new force to be reckoned with in international cinema. Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), a music publicist, and her boyfriend Chris (Lars Eidinger), a professionally frustrated architect, are on a working holiday in a Sardinian villa owned by Chris’s family, but the warmth of the Mediterranean landscape does little to melt the icy resentment that’s crept into their relationship, their disillusion and desperation conveyed by Ade in the subtlest of gestures and exchanges. A biting break-up movie that’s a remarkable work of unification, seamlessly bringing together such seemingly disparate inspirations as screwball comedy and Cassavetes psychodrama.