Ann-Kristin Reyels

Ann-Kristin Reyels was sitting at her kitchen table in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district when we met on a summer morning. The Berlin Wall used to be just a few steps from the front door. It is in one of the rougher corners of this "in" district, where tourists rarely stray. The sounds of the city could be heard from the kitchen. A white cloth was hanging like a curtain out the window, blowing in the sunshine. A sense of calm emanated from the room. It is fitting that we decided to meet here and not in some busy café.

Ann-Kristin Reyels makes quiet films. She is a detailed observer of interpersonal vibes and gets her audience to observe as well. Reyels dissects human relationships. In dialogues that leave a lot of space, she gets to the core of every mood swing of her characters. She did that in "Jagdhunde" ("Hounds"), her film debut, which has received numerous awards. With laconic humor, this film tells the story of a teenage boy whose parents separate and he moves with his father from the city to a village, where the obstinate villagers won’t talk to them. And her next film, "Formentera", is about a young couple that is shocked at how they have apparently gotten caught up in the routines of a nuclear family, so they leave their daughter at home and go on vacation in a hippie commune on the island of Formentera.

Reyels doesn’t need a lot of words. "I like films that have been distilled down to their essence. I find it more interesting to see what happens in the face of a character. Or what doesn’t. I don’t need it to be illustrated by the text," she said. If there is one trap that she wants to avoid when making films, then this is it: "Telling it all. I am afraid of taking away a character’s mystery. Some times you simply write things down, and when you read it afterwards you think, 'Oh my God! It’s been explained a hundred times over!'"

She likes to construct her films out of the spaces where they take place. Reyels shot "Tatjana", a documentary about a female boxer, in the "Ritze", a local pub in Hamburg. They have a legendary boxing cellar; she was taken by the charming demimonde cubby hole whose walls are plastered with posters of long past matches. "I found the space first and then I had to find my protagonist," explained Reyels. "In all my films I try to treat the location like another character." For her short film "dim", Reyels looked for places in Berlin that glow in the dark. She wanted to hoot at night without any extra lighting. "Jagdhunde" ("Hounds") her first theatrical feature, was supposed to take place from the very beginning in the snow, in the Uckermark, a rural region north of Berlin. "The snow set the mood for the film," she said. The story of muteness that Reyels created in that winter landscape could not have found a better setting.

Reyels has a great sensibility for the actors who share and can act out her idea of reduction. "I like to break up a scene into a few long shots. A single shot that lasts two minutes can really have incredible strength. For a feature film that is very long. It is a challenge to give a scene its dramatic tension not through editing but through the acting," said Reyels.

In order to achieve that she takes the time to work through the script very precisely with the actors prior to the shoot. "For me, a script is a mass that you work with, which you can move. In "Formentera" we often put the actors in real situations that were not staged. We discussed the scene in detail beforehand. They knew what they had to do. And then we watched what happened. This sometimes gives rise to surprising moments, which makes a scene interesting."

Reyels’s name quickly made the rounds in the German film scene. "Jagdhunde" ("Hounds"), her first feature-length film, celebrated its premiere in the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival in 2007, as did her next film, "Formentera", in 2012. That attracted the attention of film people outside of Germany. At festival showings of "Jagdhunde" ("Hounds") in Italy, Denmark, and France, Reyels saw that her stories also work for international audiences. "I had the feeling that the audience in France, for example, accepted the story more for what it was than was the case in Germany," she said. Whereas in Germany she is often asked why she wanted to tell this specific story, the audience in France was more interested in how she went about it, for instance how much of the dialogue was improvised.

While Reyels was talking, the phone on the kitchen table rang. The call lasted only a few seconds. She climbed onto the window sill and threw a cap for the youngest of her two sons down to her husband, who was standing three floors below in the courtyard. When she returned to the table I thought about how many words had been said since the telephone rang. Barely three. "Just a sec." The scene could have been taken from one of her films.

Author: Martin Kaluza