Festivals - Gerardmer 2021 : Sleep will be screened in official competition

By Mulder, 22 january 2021

Tormented by horrible nightmares that she believes to be real, Marlene (Sandra Hüller) decides to collect her dreamlike visions. Assembling nightmarish sketches, bewildering notes and memories gathered throughout the year, she goes to a remote hotel in the peaceful village of Stainbach. There, the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place and she falls into a nervous breakdown. Worried about her mother's condition, her 19-year-old daughter Mona (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) goes to the psychiatric institute to find her. For someone coming from the city, the atmosphere in the village is immediately disturbing. At the hotel - around which everything seems to revolve - the staff is friendly and helpful. But soon, a well-kept secret and an old curse are revealed that, if they are awakened, could turn Mona and her mother's life into an endless nightmare...

Sleep (Schlaf) by Michael Venus, selected for the Berlinale, is a first horror film of great assurance. Shot in a haunted hotel, this arthouse film is in the tradition of popular horror and cleverly uses genre codes to examine the persistent roots of totalitarianism through the prism of inherited or repressed trauma and the mental illnesses it can engender. By superimposing sublime and surreal images on the all-too-real isolation of rural Germany, the film unfolds according to a beautiful internal logic; reality giving way to altered dream states, and vice versa, enveloping the viewer in a troubling ambiguity. A perfect compendium of the horror felt at the moment of awakening, carried by the fascinating performances of Gro Swantje Khlohof and Sandra Hüller - two of the most famous actresses of contemporary German cinema.

A graduate of the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, Michael Venus began his career as a producer for the KiKA channel before pursuing directing studies in Hamburg. In addition to advertising, he directed several short films and music videos. Sleep is the director's first full-length feature film, lulled in his childhood by the Grimm brothers' tales, and who has a boundless admiration for Mario Bava's films and George A's Night of the Living Dead. Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

Synopsis :
In order to fight against the intense nightmares that disturb her sleep, Marlene goes to a remote hamlet in the mountains that strangely resembles the places of her night terrors. Suddenly apathetic, she is joined there by her daughter Mona, who gradually discovers the coldness of this anxiety-provoking place. While the latter tries to understand the evil that paralyzes her mother, she has to face the macabre past of this village and the threatening forces that haunt it...

Sleep
Directed by Michael Venus
Produced by Verena Gräfe-Höft
Written by Thomas Friedrich, Michael Venus
Starring Gro Swantje Kohlhof, Sandra Hüller, August Schmölzer, Marion Kracht, Max Hubacher, Martina Schöne-Radunski
Music by Johannes Lehniger & Sebastian Damerius
Cinematography: Marius von Felbert
Edited by Silke Olthoff
Distributed by Program Store (France)
Running time: 102 minutes

(Source: press release)