Nine egos, one crumbling church, and the ghost of Hamlet watching it all burn.
Nine young actors leave behind their daily lives in Berlin and travel to the country to audition for a summer theatre production to be performed in the ruins of an old church. A once-renowned Swiss director is using this week of rehearsals to find the lead for this production of “Hamlet”. The director is staying privately at the home of an old woman, but the actors are being put up at a run-down hotel with very thin walls.
Acting
Habich's fading director burns with bitter authority
Direction
Kleinert traps you in that suffocating hotel
Production
Ruined church as character, not backdrop
Director
Andreas Kleinert
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Kleinert based the hotel on actual DDR-era artists' residences, where surveillance paranoia met creative desperation.
The 2010 release coincided with Germany's 'theater crisis' debates about funding and relevance—this film answers with deliberate obsolescence.
DE
