By Luis Horacio Pineda, Contributing Writer
One city, one night, one take at the wrong moment, at the wrong place, with the wrong people.
This film was shot in one take. Yes, action… cut! Got it! Wrap it up!
The writers are Sebastian Shipper, Olivia Neergard-Holm (The 11th hour), and Eike Frederik Shulz. The responsible is the German radical film director Sebastian Shipper. You know him, or you should know him for the sui generis film Run Lola Run (1998). Wow, time flies!
The title of the film is Victoria. For some of you Victoria is just a name, but for Spanish speakers victoria also means victory. A metaphoric title. Why? Because the script tells the story of two hours and eighteen minutes of a young girl who gets in serious trouble and at the end she is the only who survives.
Don’t worry. This is not a spoiled commentary. Actually, if somebody tells you the end of a film, that doesn’t mean anything at all. Once I read one of my favorite writers (The so called Latin-American Edgar Allan Poe) Uruguay writer Horacio Quiroga’s The Dead Man. The title says that protagonist is already dead. The interesting thing here is how this banana farmer died. And trust me it is very interesting. Such a beautiful and haunting tale.
Victoria played by Spanish actress Laia Costa (The New York Times includes her in 2015’s “Breakthrough Performances of the Fall Season.”) plays a naïve frustrated piano player from Madrid, Spain who decides to go home at 4:00am after partying in a Berlin bar. She meets Sonne played by Frederick Lau (German young actor who played in over 50 roles since 2000.) and three of his friends.
They will live the most dangerous, unexpected, menacing, and inevitable out of control situation you can imagine.
This is not a Hollywood film. In fact, this film is not a movie. It’s a bank robbery. One single take. No cuts. No CGI. No cheap tricks. A real victory for independent filmmaking.
