Flora leaves. Antonis gets left behind. Elit moves in. Benni and Caro can’t seem to move on. In the classrooms, cafes, bars and train stations of an unnamed German city, the lives of several young people intersect.
The screening on the 24th will be preceded by the panel discussion “Beyond Coming-of-Age: New Cinematic Languages of Youth.”
A conversation with Ka Ki Wong and actress Elizabeth Fang (I Heard That They Are Not Going To See Each Other Anymore), alongside William Wrubel (When We Saw Each Other More Often), exploring how contemporary cinema can portray youth without relying on familiar clichés.
Both filmmakers approach youth from deeply intimate perspectives, though through very different cinematic languages. In Ka Ki Wong’s case, this takes the form of hybrid filmmaking that blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction, capturing the emotional immediacy of her characters with an urban, restless energy that at times recalls Hong Kong cinema of the 1990s. Her film moves through spontaneity and emotional urgency, less interested in conventional storytelling than in constructing emotional states through fragments, gestures, the city, and the intensity of lived experience.
Wrubel, by contrast, works through an austere and observational mise-en-scène influenced by the cinema of his mentor, Angela Schanelec, as well as by his use of Super 16mm, which lends the images a distinctive sense of texture and fragility. Rather than constructing a conventional coming-of-age narrative, Wrubel approaches youth through spaces, silences, and emotional disconnection, creating a cinematic map in which the city becomes a central emotional presence.
Both films move away from more obvious or over-explained representations of youth, offering instead nuanced, sensitive, and honest portraits of what it means to be young today.
The screening on June 25 will be introduced by its director, William Wrubel.
