A Congolese businessman with secrets meets a curator in a police raid. Love shouldn't work. It does anyway.
Perhaps they should never have met, but fate wanted otherwise. Monika and Joseph. She is a curator, he is an immigrant from Congo, a businessman with an unclear past and present. They meet during a police raid at a bar, when the first of many sparks flies between them. An understated love story, a melodrama without pathos, a fragile story about the ambiguous nature of love and the impossibility of overcoming it through reason.
Acting
Passi's magnetic opacity vs. Strauss's trembling restraint.
Direction
Bierwirth refuses easy catharsis—every frame holds its breath.
Director
Lisa Bierwirth
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Bierwirth deliberately cast Passi, a French-Congolese rapper with no acting training, to capture Josef's authentic displacement—his real-life navigation of European spaces mirrors the character's.
The film's German title 'Prince' references both Josef's self-mythologizing and the colonial history embedded in Congolese-European relationships that the romance cannot escape.
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