Sternheim

2014, FR/AT, HD video, 16:9, colour, stereo, 29 min

Trailer
Credits
Presentations

Installation

A group of teenagers find themselves in a contradictory situation. On the one hand, the 12 young people are taking part in a theatre workshop organized by the two facilitators Frauke and Eva, but on the other hand, they are participating in an audition for director Christoph Martin’s new film. These two educational settings seem to increasingly contradict each other, and the young protagonists still have to define the roles they want to play in this setting. How do they  approach these different requirements and can they offer  resistance towards them?

Sternheim is a semi-documentary video that derives from creating an experimental situation. It is loosely based on the Bildungsroman (coming of age novel) Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim by Sophie La Roche, juxtaposing the genre of Bildungsroman with its successor in popular culture, the TV casting show. The video partly replays dramaturgic elements of casting shows in order to investigate their aesthetic potential and, at the same time, to critique the ideas about education and subjectivation conveyed in these TV formats.

“Pöschl employs conventions and clichés of documentary formats, while increasingly blending these with staged sequences, thereby creating a complex interlac­ing of various levels of reality and identity: acting rehearsal and documentary plot, history and present, the fiction of narration and reality, characters and actors begin to overlap. Thus the film becomes a maze, which at any given moment seems to be almost impossible to exit, even for the director herself.” 

(Constanze Ruhm: Casting as Agency)

Credits

Director, scriptwriter and producer: Marlies Pöschl
Protagonists: Valerie Angermayr, Lilly Bacher, Sophie Ferner, Selina Graf, Anna Schmeikal, Juliane Stadler, Verena Stümpfle, Sebastian Hartl, Andreas Kellner, Gabriel Staffa, Alexander Stockinger, Florian Macheiner, Frauke Steiner, Rosalin Hertrich, Alena Baich, Andreas Markus
Assistant director: Melani Murkovic

Line producer: Cedomira Schlapper
Cinematography: Leopold Leskovar, Barbara Sas, David Rabeder, Philipp Kaindl, Carolina Machtynger

Sound: David Rabeder, Simon Rabeder, Martin Fisch
Sound Design: Stefan Hajek

Editing: Sebastian Schreiner

Set Design: Ivonne Stark

Costumes & props: Radmila Tasic