FESTE & FREUNDE - EIN HOCH AUF UNS! /  LONG… STORY… SHORT

Germany, 2025, and 107 minutes, Colour.

Laura Tonke, Jasmine Shakeri, Anette Frier, Ronald Zerhfeld..

Directed by David Dietl.

Lightly serious, Long… Story… Short. Its appeal is to audiences in their 30s and 40s, especially their 40s like the main protagonists here, a circle of friends from way back, their meeting on New Year’s Eve, 2019, the experience of Covid, relationships, betrayals, through 2021 to a culmination in 2023. The framework of the screenplay is a number of celebrations, birthdays, marriages, funerals.

Response will depend on identification with each of the characters, sympathetic with the teacher and his fiancee, or puzzles and alienation from most of the others in the group, deception and affairs, marriage breakups, children, a lesbian relationship and adoption of children…

While the issues are serious, there are treated with the light touch, often the comic touch, a Germanic comic touch.