Der Freund

Summary

The film tells the story of Nino, a young immigrant from Georgia, who lives with her son Luca in Berlin. Luca’s father ran off and Nino’s family back home doesn’t want to have any contact with her since the father of her son is black, and as a result, her son is, too.

Alone and far away from home with no job, a poor education and no perspectives, she looks for answers in the works of the infamous Marquise de Sade. After being fired from her job as a waitress, she meets a mysterious Frenchman in a park in Berlin. He listens to her story and seems to be the only person who understands her situation. She progressively becomes a slave to the emotional state of de Sade’s ideas and comes to the conclusion that the only way to heal her own wounds is to inflict pain upon someone else.

For fear of hurting her son, she brings him to a youth emergency shelter for a few days. Now completely alone, the Frenchman is her only remaining friend. At some point she asks him if she can inflict pain upon him in order to free herself from her own emotional agony. He agrees, and the two go to a “studio” dressed in leather and equipped with a strap-on dildo. There they celebrate a very strange, but cathartic “sadomasochistic show”. Nino manages to free herself from her emotional entanglements and can now be a good mother for Luca again.

Source: 50. Internationale Hofer Filmtage 2016