COMMENTS OF
THE DIRECTOR

In one of Kleist’s letters, he describes a night of despair and sleeplessness. He runs out—out of the city, into the night. As he passes through the city gate and stands beneath the archway, he looks up. He studies the arch. And he realizes that, because all the stones want to fall and wedge against each other as they do, they form the arch beneath which one is safe.

Perhaps many stories—those of cinema, of literature—are like such arches, hollow spaces within misfortune. This story here is such an archway.

A young woman who sees no way forward. A family at the end of its rope, which could be described with the beautiful opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Both—the family and the young woman—are at their limit, in free fall. But they support each other, forming an arch. Beneath which, they begin to live again.