Marian Malin witnesses a terrorist attack. On the outside she remains unharmed, but the emotional wound tears open time and time again. She no longer feels safe in her familiar everyday life in the city and retreats to an old house by the forest, to the world of her childhood. There, in the solitude of nature, she regains her footing – until she comes face to face with Gerti.
Screenplay inspired by the novel Wald by Doris Knecht.
“Both female characters, in the film as well as in the novel, are united by one thought: What happens when my system collapses? This is a question that preoccupies all self-employed and, even more intensely, women who are also single mothers.
I wanted to trace this fear and, on the other hand, to see which resources – that we often forget in everyday urban life because we don’t need them – we have at our disposal. Another aspect is the unromantic facet of escaping, of this forced exit from familiar urban everyday life: in the novel, it’s the financial crisis, in the film, it’s not being able to cope in the city after the trauma of the terrorist attack. In the course of the script writing process, I moved away from the original material. But I still put the material in the drawer for a few months because I couldn’t find the key to my main character. She remained a stranger to me. Then, shortly after the terrorist attack in Vienna, I rewrote the screenplay within just a few weeks, and everything fell into place. [...]”
Elisabeth Scharang