Requiem

Colour, 35 mm
Germany, 2005, 93 min
Section: Horizons

Synopsis

A small town in South Germany, the 1970s. Twenty-one-year-old Michaela has grown up in a deeply religious family. She leaves her emotionally cold parents to go to university, where, far from home, she gets her first taste of freedom. She starts a friendship with Hanna and falls in love with her fellow student Stefan, but she cannot free herself of the effects of her upbringing and in the end she has a breakdown. Are the terrifying spectral faces and voices that persecute her just the result of epileptic fits? She goes home, and her frightened family turns to the priest, who decides that the girl is possessed by the devil... The real tragedy of a Catholic girl who died in 1976 from the effects of an exorcism has recently inspired two films, the other being Scott Derrickson’s horror film The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005).

About the director

Hans-Christian Schmid (b. 1965, Altötting, Germany) studied film at Munich’s Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film, and screenwriting at the University of Southern California. In 1989 he made the documentary Sekt oder Selters (1989), followed by the short Das Lachende Gewitter (1989) and another documentary, Die Mechanik des Wunders (1992), and a TV film about religious sectarianism Himmel und Hölle (1994). His feature debut was After Five in the Forest Primeval (Nach Fünf im Urwald, 1995), while his thriller 23 (1998) brought him a series of awards including the Don Quixote Prize at Locarno in 1998, and was screened in the section Another View at Karlovy Vary. He then directed an adaptation of Benjamin Lebert’s novel Crazy (2000). Another of his films, Distant Lights (Lichter, 2003), for which he and Michael Gutmann were jointly awarded the Bavarian Film Award for Screenplay, was screened at Karlovy Vary. He is currently working on the film Storm.