Human Flowers of Flesh

• Helena Wittmann
• 106 min
• Germany, France
• 2022
• Fiction

Helena Wittmann follows up acclaimed debut Drift by sailing across azure seas in dazzling, hypnotic critics’ favorite.

It is the wind that has set the course and has now taken Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) and her five-strong crew to Marseille. There, she overhears conversations and studies the port quarters and the people who populate them, but what piques her curiosity is the presence of the French Foreign Legion, which is based in the city. So much so that she decides to follow them. An undulating sail via Corsica and across the Mediterranean to the Algerian Sidi Bel Abbès, through Wittman’s 16-mm camera becomes an almost hypnotic film experience, where Ida’s curiosity and the questions it raises are more important than actual answers and where the journey into the history of the Legion soon mixes with the film’s ditto, as traces of Claire Denis Beau Travail (1999) appear.

- Rasmus Kilander

• Drama
• Resa
• Natur
• Historia
• Äventyr