23/08/2021 - Lisa Bierwirth's debut film is a romantic culture clash set in Frankfurt

There is a fabulous meet-cute in Prince [+see also:
trailer
interview: Lisa Bierwirth
film profile], where an art curator and an immigrant from Congo meet behind trash cans in the back of an illegal bar in Frankfurt. It’s the start of a romance that will see him challenge her white liberal outlook of the world, and see her challenge his belief that he can only get ahead by bending the rules. Prince is playing in the Crystal Globe Competition section at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

The debut film from Lisa Bierwirth, who was the artistic assistant and dramaturgical advisor on Valeska Grisebach's acclaimed Western [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jonas Dornbach
interview: Valeska Grisebach
interview: Valeska Grisebach
film profile], is produced by Maren Ade's company Komplizen Film. This film shares with these acclaimed directors a curiosity about what happens to a white liberal female when she falls in love with or clashes with men with different world views.

Prince is told from the perspective of forty-something Monika, played with delicate charm by Ursula Strauss (Fly Away Home [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Place of Shelter). She is in a moment of crisis: her boss got another job without warning her and she must find a new position, but this is not going to be easy, especially as her honesty has made her enemies in the art world. It's on the evening that she finds all this out that she ends up in an illegal bar on the hunt for cigarettes. She's out back smoking when the police raids the place. In a desperate attempt to avoid being spotted, she's pushed behind trash cans by Joseph. In a first leading role for Passi Balende, a hip-hop artist who contributed to the soundtrack of Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, he depicts Joseph as a volcano. Most of the time, he's calm and unthreatening, but there is always the threat that he'll explode in unpredictable ways.

Revealing what life in the art world is actually like for most people, Monika lives in a pretty ordinary flat, where Joseph starts spending a lot of time. Joseph is in his own moment of crisis as he wants to set up a business selling diamonds, but with no papers, there is no official way for him to do so. He's stuck in a Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare. There is a lot of walking and talking in the film, which at times feel repetitive and meandering, but when the characters sit down at dinner with art curators, drinks with the paperless or meetings with local officials, the film explodes. Joseph makes strong points about white liberals commenting on places they've never been, and how often the only option for him is crime. Westerner Monika is able to fit more easily into all those different worlds and to handle the bureaucratic obstacles put in Joseph's way. The characters are well observed and sympathetically drawn, which more than makes up for the loose plot.

The central conundrum rises when Monika must find a few thousand euros to help Joseph out of a pickle. Her friends worry about her. Is she being taken for a ride? Bierwirth plays with the audience’s unconscious bias right up to the enigmatic ending. Although uneven in pacing, Prince is a film that provides food for thought and uses the idea of art being about representation to play and bend archetypes.

Prince is a Komplizen Film production, in co-production with ZDF – Das kleine Fernsehspiel, supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, HessenFilm und Medien, the German Federal Film Board, the German Federal Film Fund, and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.