Maria is a student at the university of Essen, Germany, living and working in a gray, unpleasant, and anonymous environment. While she has little problem finding someone for a one night stand, she rebuffs her lovers in such a rude way that they actually don't know what's going on. But what seems to be a negative attitude at first glance is in fact much worse: Maria is suffering from borderline syndrome, a serious psychotic disease that makes her fail to develop a continuous, reliable personality, from her own perspective as well as from the perspective of those she meets. Then one day, she bumps into Jan, a student who falls in love with her without delay. He's awaiting a hard time when he has to learn how hard it is to stay loyal and faithful to a person who, in her own words, "has a different world inside of her head" and who feels that "there is something inside of me that eats me up."
Acting
Lavinia Wilson's raw, unpredictable volatility is genuinely unsettling.
Direction
Durchschlag's grim Ruhr aesthetic mirrors Maria's fractured psyche.
Director
Thomas Durchschlag
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
One of the rare early 2000s films to portray BPD with clinical input rather than Hollywood hysteria; screened at German psychiatry conferences.
The Ruhr industrial backdrop — decaying factories, gray skies — was deliberately chosen to visualize what clinicians call 'structural dissociation': environment as fractured self.
DE
