Afternoon

Director: Angela Schanelec

2007 / 97min / 35mm

In a lakeside villa in Potsdam, the members of a family of estranged artists, among them director Schanelec herself, playing a self-absorbed theatre actor, have gathered for a few days of summer holiday. The sun-dappled scenery is gorgeous—Schanelec has perhaps never made a lovelier, more luminescent movie—but the fresh air is soon thick with unspoken resentments in this very free reworking of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, which also echoes not a little the stifling family drama in Pasolini’s Teorema.