Amerikafilm

A funeral car cruises the streets of Medellín, while a young director tells the story of his past in this violent and conservative city. He remembers the pre-production of his first film, a Class-B movie with ghosts. The young queer scene of Medellín is casted for the film, but the main protagonist dies of a heroin overdose at the age of 21, just like many friends of the director. Anhell69 explores the dreams, doubts and fears of an annihilated generation, and the struggle to carry on making cinema.

The director turns the diary of his sexual adventures into a serial narrative in the style of “One Thousand and One Nights”. This polyamorously-minded queer musical applies the same playful approach to folk tales as it does to Egyptian pop music.

The film is set in a modern day 'Berlin Republic' liberated from all irrelevancies. It's about artistic production, the creative industries and above all film and cinema - a political manifesto in feature film format. It centres on Asta, tough, hardened by theory and immaculately styled right down to the emblems on her leather jacket, with current art scene jargon flowing elegantly from her lips.

Phoebe Phaidon works as a climatologist at an institute of cybernetics which is about to be shut down. So there has to be a solution in the form of a successful evaluation. The strategy consultants now work against the student movement in a virtual reality. Turmoils start.

Paul (23) and Radu (53) are a couple in crisis. They are visited every day in their home by a small film crew. Together with the filmmaker, they go through a “deconstruction of memory” process, via procedures such as intimate video diaries, exercises inspired from family constellations, re-enactments of key memories and dreams, in an attempt to make sense of their explosive relationship.

At first calm, even dreamy, the film takes the viewer into the quiet of the seaside and undersea landscape somewhere in Italy. They are soon shaken awake from these blissful images by footage of traces of today's global industrial world, as an increasing part of the sea is polluted by wastewater from factories, destroying the natural beauty.