Angela Schanelec 

Germany

In I Stayed in Berlin All Summer (1993), her debut fiction short of 50 minutes, Schanelec herself plays Nadine, who is obsessed by a memory linked to a haunting tune she can no longer sing — until she hears someone else singing and everything falls back into place again.

My Sister's Happiness (1995), her DFFB diploma feature which was awarded the 1996 German Critics Prize, takes place in a city — "no particular city, as long as it's big and noisy". It's the story of a love triangle: Christian, a photographer, is in love with both Isabel (Angela Schanelec), a translator, and Ariane, her half-sister and a gardener, who, in turn, loves Christian passionately and is afraid of losing him. Schanelec probes just how far such a relationship can progress. "At some point in the making of this film I realised that I was determined to show that a man is perfectly capable of loving two women — but, to be honest, I still don't know whether this is true or not."

Places in Cities appears to take up where My Sister's Happiness left off. Mimmi (Sophie Aigner), a disarmingly attractive yet reserved 19-year-old about to face her matriculation exams, leaves on a school trip to Paris – where she meets a man, spends a night with him, returns home to Berlin and later discovers she's pregnant. Although her exams are now drawing closer, she makes the decision to return to Paris. Schanelec spent months looking for the right face and personality to play Mimmi, because "she is in nearly every shot, and the takes are rather long and demanding". Also, as is usual in Schanelec's style of directing, the story unfolds in fragments: we watch a girl, whose primary contacts are mother and school, as she crosses the threshold into womanhood. Ron Holloway