The work of a team of German workers who are sent to rural Bulgaria to build a hydroelectric power station is disrupted by the friction with the inhabitants of a small village nearby, revealing the intense differences in culture, language and traditions between the two groups. The third feature film by Valeska Grisebach (script supervisor of Toni Erdmann), premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and achieving the Jury Prize at the Seville Film Festival, introduces us to a tribute to the genre, to silent disputes between outsiders and locals, to the diffuse idea of the hero and the villain and, above all, to the relentless fight for territory.
Valeska Grisebach
Bremen, 1968. She studied Philosophy and German Studies in Berlin, Munich and Vienna. In 1993 she began studying to be a director at the Viennese Film Academy under Peter Patzak, Wolfgang Glück and Michael Haneke. Her graduation film, ‘Be my Star’ (2001), was nominated for the Adolf Grimme Award in 2002 and received a special mention at the Toronto IFF’s Critics’ Award as well as the Grand Jury Award at the Turin Film Festival. Her second feature film, ‘Longing’, premiered in 2006 in the Berlinale competition and received several awards at festivals like Bafici, Gijón or Warsaw. In 2017 she was selected for Un Certain Regard in Cannes with ‘Western’, which subsequently won various awards at the festivals in Seville, Mar del Plata, Jerusalem, Istanbul and Minsk.
Screenings
O.V. in German, Bulgarian, English subtitled in English and Spanish