Blank Stares and Hard Cash

What alliance could be less probable than the one between a top model whose main concern is to please and to boost her sponsors’ sales and a left-wing film maker with an intense sensitivity to the question of the impact that the power of men and the consumer society have on women? The fruit of happy ‘family ties’, the film does not linger on the necessary images of the packaging of women’s bodies towards aims of exhibitionism. Portraying well beyond the clichés of the modelling profession, Helga Reidemeister does not content herself with capturing all the constraints inherent to the fashion world, but focuses her film on the contradictions, fragilities and day-to-day suffering it induces - as far as the abysmal void to which her heroic sister is confronted. It is through an intimate face to face encounter that she, once more, arouses, or provokes, speech.

Jürgen Ellinghaus
Programmer, director