Helene Hegemann wrote the screenplay to her partly-autobiographically film Torpedo at the age of 14. At 15 she filmed it. In Torpedo, after the death of her mother, the 15-year-old Mia moves to Berlin to stay with her aunt, and falls into the left-liberal snobbery of Prenzlauer Berg. Everyone is only interested in themselves, and ultimately fall victim to their own idiocy. Mia rapidly gives up hope of growing up in a regulated family relationship, and instead seeks to establish herself in a thoroughly strange adult world. Hegemann’s formally captivating film debut repeatedly breaks through the filmic illusion through a deliberate asynchronicity between the picture and the soundtrack, and a non-chronological narrative structure. In the process, the director succeeds in giving a precise view of the self-declared Berlin bohemianism, which she observes with a genuine mixture of slapstick and poetry.
German with English subtitles
Helene Hegemann, Torpedo, 2008, Mini 35/DV, 45 Min © credofilm; Joroni Film.
Helene Hegemann (*1992) is a writer, director, and actress. She lives and works in Berlin. In 2010 she published her first novel Axolotl Roadkill.
Nicolaus Schafhausen (*1965) has been the director of the Kunsthalle Wien since October 2012.