29/06/2011

Since June 23, Babelsberg Studios have been hosting the shoot for Sherry Hormann’s latest project, Anleitung Zum Unglücklichsein. This time, the director of award-winning film Desert Flower [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (based on the autobiography of Somali top model Waris Dirie, a victim of female circumcision) has decided to adapt The Situation Is Hopeless But Not Serious - The Pursuit Of Unhappiness, a spoof self-help manual published in 1983 by Austrian constructivist theorist Paul Watzlawick, a refugee in the United States.

In Hormann’s romantic comedy, actress Johanna Wokalek (Shooting Star 2006, who played Gudrun Ensslin in The Baader Meinhof Complex [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and the female pope in Sönke Wortmann’s Pope Joan [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) is the perfect embodiment of Watzlawick’s argument, according to which potentially happy individuals find a thousand ways to make themselves miserable by only focusing on their failures or by expecting too much of others. She plays a neurotic, dreamy and superstitious single woman who is convinced that everything good in her life turns out badly sooner or later, which is all the more ironic as she sells fortune cookies.

Wokalek stars alongside Iris Berben (Betsy in Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), David Kross (Shooting Star 2009, who gained international fame for his title role in The Reader [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) and Richy Müller (The Poll Diaries [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Chris Kraus
film profile]).

Anleitung Zum Unglücklichsein is produced by Peter Herrmann (who was behind Oscar-winning film Nowhere in Africa [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) for Desert Flower Filmproduktion, in co-production with ARD Degeto / Bavarian Broadcasting, Babelsberg Studios, B.A. Produktion and Kinowelt. The project is backed by national funds FFA and DFFF and three regional funds: NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia), MBB (Berlin-Brandenburg) and FFF Bavaria.

Shooting will continue until the beginning of August, between Babelsberg, Berlin and the North Rhine-Westphalia region. The film will be released in theatres on March 8, 2012 by Kinowelt.

(Translated from French)