Cloud 9

Inge is pushing 70, but feels like 17. She’s in love. Karl is almost 80. It’s passion. It’s sex. She never would have thought it could happen again. Inge is married to Werner. For 30 years now. She loves her husband. He was always good to her. Love needs time. This is what all three of them don’t have…

With Cloud 9 Andreas Dresen has made a radical, unusual film about longings, love and sexuality in old age; it was developed in close cooperation with his outstanding actors. Dresen: “We didn’t have a screenplay written out, but there was a kind of scene schedule we kept to. We knew how the story would end, but the scenes themselves were all developed together with the actors on location out of improvisation, as were the dialogues.”

Dresen portrays the figures with much love and consequence, and something like hope for old age: “The essential thing for us was always that the woman, who thinks she has already experienced all there is going to be, is suddenly struck by lightning, that she experiences the natural disaster of love. I thought it was very beautiful that in the end something’s still pumping in our bodies and we can fall in love, with everything that goes along with it, with joy and the corresponding pain. It is, of course, also a tragedy, but it is the story of the great awakening of a woman who brings it off with all her strength and on her own volition.” —Berlinale