FSFF 2025 >> FÜNF SEEN FILMPREIS
Film discussion with costume designer Monika Buttinger at all screenings
Vienna, 1981. Perla is a single mother living with her daughter in Vienna. ‘Please speak German,’ her daughter Julia says to her. Perla fled Czechoslovakia while pregnant. Her daughter is embarrassed by her mother's native language on the underground. She dreams of playing like Horowitz, but Perla can no longer afford piano lessons. A new love could bring financial security – if it weren't for Perla's ex-husband and Julia's father, who calls her after being released from prison. Suddenly there are two men and two ‘homes’: Vienna, a city where Perla feels out of place, and the nameless village in Czechoslovakia that she doesn't want to leave. When Julia's father Andrej is released from prison and claims to be seriously ill, Perla embarks on a dangerous journey back to communist Czechoslovakia. Torn between the past and the present, Perla must make decisions that could also jeopardise her future with her daughter.
"Perla works with gaps in the narrative vacuum, with moments in which you follow blindly, without knowing which direction the film will take. This is masterfully prepared: a past love affair, mysterious phone calls, unearthed trauma and a new life in Vienna. What happened back then? The film plays with unreliability... Perla – as a film and as a character – is masterfully ambivalent. Rarely do we see female characters like this, who are people in their own right and not just caught up in the web of socio-economic circumstances.” (kino-zeit.de)
