Never Sleep Again
1992, narrative, 35mm, color, 92 min.
Directed & Produced by: Pia Frankenberg
Screenplay: in collaboration with Karin Aström
Camera: Judith Kaufmann
Starring: Lisa Kreuzer, Gaby Herz, Christiane Carstens, Ernst Stötzner, Leonard Lansink, Michael Altmann, and Peter Lohmeyer
Festivals: Filmfest München
Distribution: Filmwelt (Deutsche Kinemathek Frankenberg archive)
An episodic tale of the encounters and situations that three friends – Rita, Lilian, and Roberta – run into during a trip to Berlin.
The buddies travel on a river boat to a friend’s wedding. But Rita’s unexpected encounter with a former lover brings the festive outing to an abrupt halt. Stranded in the Brandenburg outback, they begin an aimless odyssey driven by a desire not to return to everyday life and marked by the symptoms of gradual decay.
They roam euphorically, embracing happenstance. The happiness of the homeless. The tires are stolen off their car, hotels and inns are full. There is no way back. “So what do we do now?” “Carry on!”
They drift through the city of ruins, seekers; a sweeping conquest, excursive and chaotic. Then they turn to experiments.They start by pursuing complete strangers …
“I wanted to make a fast film, a snack film, like life in a specific moment.”Pia Frankenberg
Reviews
“A film about the state of the nation, subjective and sardonic, laconic and immediate. (…) Lisa Kreuzer, a heroine of Wenders’ better days, Gaby Herz, and Christiane Carstens play the divergent trio, who get along until they don’t, with spontaneous power and laconic humor.”Szene, Hamburg
“Never Sleep Again is a clever, complicated, different bit of cinema; it demands our openness to its unusual, uncomfortable form.
”Tip Berlin
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Reviews
“A plea for a wandering gaze.”Der Spiegel
“A fresh, melancholy portrait of women delighting in a nervous breakdown.”Stern
“A drifter film with a snooping bent, with a whimsical joy in the absurd.”Abendzeitung, Munich
“Pia Frankenberg doesn’t tell a round story, but rather episodes. And no other narrative form could be better suited to the content because it is exactly those little incidents that befall the women in Berlin that make up the crux of the whole.”Berliner Morgenpost
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“A light etude on friendship, joie de vivre, and German sensibilities, sometimes profound, sometimes funny, but never hysterical or sentimental.”EPD-Film, Frankfurt
“Sensitive and, at the same time, told with a light touch of storytelling skill unmatched in German cinema, the Hamburg director Pia Frankenberg has once again mounted a terrible-beautiful circle dance of emotions.”Filmfaust, Frankfurt
“The story of three women with no foresight, no hindsight, and no plan exudes an odd melancholy … No frame without a new set-up, without a new point of view.”Filmbewertungsstelle