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The film interviews five people who cannot pay their electricity bills. They live below the poverty line without light and heat, in or near large cities. Berlin-based artist Laurence Grave acts a composite role, representing aspects of the other people. She sees, hears, and touches in her forsaken apartment, and feels limited and excluded. At the same time she is extra-sensitive to the passage of light, day and night, through her windows. A long indoor twilight persists between the bright sunlight and the nightcar lights that both shine onto her walls making ‘cinema’. The sounds that creep into the apartment are just alien to her. The people interviewed read their responses for the camera – a technique meant to relax the original interview and give the people some interpretative distance from themselves. They speak of how they lost work, then electricity, then hope, and finally found clever solutions to their precarious situations.
In the end the actress rises from her dark world to dizzy heights, flashing with her own electricity, remaking the rules of the game. Elektra triumphs!
Eva C. Heldmann, born in 1951 in Dillenburg, lives and works in Berlin. She has been making films and videos since 1983.
Filmography (excerpt): Riverred (2012, Forum Expanded 2012), Puffrock back in America (2011, Forum Expanded 2011), Fremd gehen (1999, Forum 2000), Johnny oder das rohe Fleisch (1984).
Contact: evaheldmann@gmx.de www.heldmannfilm.de
Cast: Laurence Grave, Margit Liebl, Michael Kleist, Claudia Kottke, Timotheus Kartmann, Dirk Reheis
Director of photography: Ulrike Pfeiffer
Editor: Dörte Völz-Mammarella
Music: Eunice Martins
Running time: 83 min
Language: German
