The award-winning drama by Austrian director Wollner, which took home the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, closely embraces loss and life after tragedy. One of the most delicate cinema events this year, the film showcases its author’s masterful ability to translate subjectivism and its blind spots onto the screen. Our mind and memory do not work linearly, and chronology is shaped by slides of captured moments.

Berlin. Life before and after. Mother Ella lives with her teenage daughter, Jessie, and her youngest daughter, Melli. A tragic event brings the family and her older daughter’s boyfriend, Lux, closer together. Grappling with guilt and forgiveness, they decide to take a trip to Tenerife for a family holiday that never happened. Under the glowing sun, past and present quietly begin to overlap – conversations, unplayed video games, arguments, places and objects constantly evoke a sense of presence…

A preventable tragedy and cinema as an exploration of affect, inspired by Skeeter Davis’ song “The End of the World”. In one of the most talked-about works this year, experienced filmmaker Wollner avoids sentimental aesthetisation, offering a melancholic reflection in its stead. The film’s focal point is the sun that refuses to set – a figurative crack in reality that exposes the unbearable thought: how can the world keep turning after what happened? It is not the director’s first in-depth study of the sense of loss (see The Trouble with Being Born (2020)). But in her latest work, she merges the perception of reality with the surreal, exploring performed normality in the relationships between parents and children, placing the film alongside Aftersun (2022), whose cinematographer was also the talented Gregory Oke. Created using subdued, intelligent and emotionally intense cinematic language, the film dissects the psychology of grief, asking us to inhabit what is (not) happening rather than rationalise it.