Starting over is the hardest part. That’s how Marian feels when everything she could ever wish for has slipped through her fingers: fulfilment in journalism, profound love, and time to pursue her professional ambitions. The life she desired was cut short by a terrorist attack in the centre of Vienna. Not seeing herself as a victim, rather as a witness, and experiencing traumatic flashbacks, Marian can no longer stay in the city and returns to her grandparents’ country house amid forests. Here she seems to feel safe, spending her days in the woods and reconnecting with her former home. However, her smouldering past resurfaces when she encounters Gerti and Franz from her youth. Will the forest help her find reconciliation with her past?

Perhaps it is our early childhood when we felt the safest – and we try to return to that time, seeking that sense of refuge again and again. Is that what we want? Austrian director Scharang has based the film on the popular novel The Forest (2015) by Doris Knecht and her personal memories, having experienced the terrorist attack in Vienna in 2020, which claimed the lives of four people and injured 23. Screened at festivals in Toronto, Seattle, and elsewhere, this atmospheric and introspective drama on reckoning with the past may seem simple at first glance – a successful woman returns to where she began her life –, yet the director has added extra layers of meaning to this masterclass in the anatomy of trauma. For the RIGA IFF audience, the greatest revelation is bound to be the German actress Brigitte Hobmeier – her character bearing a striking resemblance to Diane Kruger’s tormented heroine in the award-winning trauma revision In the Fade (2017). Hobmeier’s emotional range gives the character true blood, flesh, and a troubled heart; so much like our own.