The 73rd Berlin Film Festival begins on Thursday, February 16th and will last until February 26th. This year’s main competition program also includes a minority Serbian co-production – the feature film “Music” by German director Angela Shanelec, supported by Film Center Serbia. The author’s previous film, “I was at home, but…” (2019, also created with the support of FCS) had its world premiere in the competition program of the Berlinale, where Shanelec was crowned with the Silver Bear award for best director, after which followed a long series of awards at film festivals around the world.

The film tells the story of John, who was abandoned at birth in the Greek mountains on a stormy night. John was taken and adopted without ever knowing his birth father or mother. As a young man, he meets Iro, the warden of the prison where he is imprisoned after a fatal tragic accident. She seems to be seeking his presence, texting about him, recording music for him. But then, John begins to lose his eyesight…

Shanelek wrote the screenplay, edited and directed the film. The director of photography, as in her previous film, was Ivan Marković, Rainer Gerlach was in charge of the sound, Anert Gitter was in charge of the costumes, and Ingo Klier was in charge of the scenography. The cast includes: Aliocha Schneider, Agathe Bonitzer, Marisha Triantafillidou, Argiris Xafs, Frida Tarana, Ninel Skrzipczyk, Miriam Jakob, Wolfgang Michael, Finn-Henri Reiels. The producers of the film are: Kiril Krasovski (Faktura Film), François d’Artemard (Les Films de l’Apres-Midi), co-producers Vladimir Vidić and Nataša Damnjanović (Dart Film). Giorgos Karnavasi and Konstantinos Kontovrakis (Heretić) are the executive producers of this production, a co-production between Germany, France and Serbia.

Angela Shanelek was born in 1962 in Allen, Germany. After graduating from high school in Frankfurt, she worked as an actress in numerous German theaters. She attended the Academy for Film and Television in Berlin (DffB) in 1990, where she met Christian Peckold and Tomas Arslan, with whom she formed what would later become known as the “Berlin Film School”, i.e. its first wave. Since then, she has written and directed several short and feature films, which had their premiere at festivals in Cannes (2004 “Marseille” – A certain view, award for the best screenplay of the German Film Critics Association), Berlin (almost all of her films, except ” Marseille” and “Dreamy Road”), Toronto and Locarno (2016 “Dreamy Road”). Retrospectives of her films were organized in Rome, Lisbon, Buenos Aires and Mexico City.