The Goethe-Institut Toronto is proud to present the Canadian premiere of Sabrina Sarabi's award-winning "No One's With the Calves" as the film representing Germany at the EUFF Canada 2022, streaming and in cinema in Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa. Here's the origin story, told by the director:
How did you come across Alina Herbing‘s novel and what attracted you to it?
My starting point was wanting to adapt a novel. After my very personal debut, I liked the idea of filming material that I had to make my own. I started reading a lot in the editing phase of “Prélude”, and then my producer gave me "Calves."
I read the book in one go and thought it was great: This weird young woman who acts so incredibly stupidly but has something gentle about her captivated me at once. And as opposed to other books I liked before, here I could see the whole movie in my mind‘s eye right away.
After the ambitious self-optimizers in Prélude, No One‘s with the Calves looks at the aimless and the disoriented: Are these to you two facets of your own generation?
You might say that. Novelist Alina Herbing was born in 1984 and processed her own experience of country life in the book. The screenplay was written later, which in turn brought in new influences from the present. So it doesn‘t stop with my generation. A lot of things have fallen away in former East Germany, including the social structures of villages, and because there is less work on offer, it‘s more boring for young people to stay in the countryside. At the same time, of course, the city has grown much closer in recent decades. But I think the desolation in rural life has been around for a long time.
It‘s evident that in the countryside too a large part of communication has shifted to cell phones. Is this a comment on modern forms of communication?
It was indeed on my mind: all these taciturn men who never talk to Christin. It‘s true, there are often devices as intermediaries. Nevertheless, I wonder: Was there a time in the past when people talked a lot about everything? Did we really talk about problems when we were fourteen-year-old teenagers? And if I look at my grandparents and my mother, who grew up in the 1950s, they never really talked either, though probably for different reasons in the post-war generation.
Was author Alina Herbing involved in writing the screenplay?
She trusted us completely and didn‘t want to be involved. But she was always responsive when I had questions and provided me with all her research material. Before I started writing, I drove through all the places that inspired her – I did a little "novel tour" that she put together for me. I lived with the parents of Fritz Habekuss for a week – he‘s an editor for DIE ZEIT who‘s from Brandenburg – and got to know several people in the village who run farms, including a shepherdess and a young village teacher. As well as the Pritzwalk brass band. And I kept driving around alone.
That time in the country was most formative for the narrative. At some point, I gave Alina a script version into which she wrote her notes. Working with her was a fantastic process. To her, it was something new evolving from her book and she was able to generously let go.
Did the stations of this investigative journey become the film adaptation‘s locations?
No, simply because many of the locations no longer existed. The site with the prefab building where the father lived, for example, is just green meadow now.
While the story in the novel is set in eastern Germany, the film is more reminiscent of American teen coming-of-age stories about wanting to escape the drab provinces.
Was that a conscious decision?
No, initially I worked through the novel very carefully, but then at some point put it aside.
Aspects that are very present in the novel then naturally recede. The novel jumps back and forth between the present and the past, where former East Germany is naturally more apparent. In the present, you see more of the consequences.
The whole film feels very immediate and direct, very much told-from-the-now. How did you develop the visual concept together with DOP Max Preiss, with whom you were working for a second time?
Since we‘d already worked together, Max was involved from very early on. It was always important for us to tell the story up close to Christin. Unlike “Prélude”, we didn‘t have a shot list going in.
I wanted to film everything in the moment. The actors had to be free in their movements, which in turn meant Max had to react directly to feeling and mood. The whole film is shot with a handheld camera, with which Max nonetheless creates calm, beautiful images. Despite all the close-ups, he leaves the viewer room to make discoveries.
How did the very understated score come about?
I didn‘t actually want any composed music at all, but my producer put me in touch with John Gürtler, who also wrote the music for Nora Fingscheidt‘s “System Crasher”. The work was initially open-ended; in a long process that began back during the shoot,
this very subtle music emerged which isn‘t at all a classical soundtrack, but rather a psycho-acoustic sound into which monotonous noise, such as the endless chirping of crickets or the rotating of windmills, is incorporated.
Gender roles are much more traditional in the countryside than in the city. Was that an issue for you?
Absolutely. It struck me as rather extreme, to be honest. Especially when I was alone there for a month – the way patriarchy still abides there, and how pronounced the sexism is. Which ultimately leads to many young women wanting to leave. This is very much a topic in the novel, too.
One notices that you staged your two feature films in a very cinematic way, with the important information not conveyed by words. Who are your cinematic role models?
Of the younger filmmakers, I hold Andrea Arnold and her taciturn heroes in great esteem. What plays between the lines is often much more important than the words uttered. Although nothing exciting happens on the face of it, her films are tightly constructed dramaturgically speaking and draw you in. In terms of the classics, I like Maurice Pialat. He makes me feel familiar with the situations he addresses, like I‘m sitting in these people‘s living rooms or bedrooms. It feels very real, you get very close to the protagonists.
image courtesy WeydemannBros./MaxPreiss
