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Bildausschnitt: beleuchteter, festlicher, vertäfelter Filmvorführraum

Angela Schanelec
Der traumhafte Weg
(Dreamed Path, The)

  • Production Year 2016
  • color / Durationcolor / 81 min.
  • IN Number IN 4431

Many years ago, they were a couple. In 1984, Theres and Kenneth travelled through Greece together, paying their way as street musicians. The carefree happiness comes to an abrupt end when Kenneth hears of his mother's accident and immediately returns to his English homeland. When the two meet again in Germany, the magic of the past is gone. Thirty years later in Berlin: the actress Ariane leaves her husband David, a renowned anthropologist. From his new apartment located close to the Berlin central train station, David can see a homeless person. When Theres passes the man on the street, she realizes: the homeless man is Kenneth. After an exchange of glances, she passes by wordlessly.

Greece, the summer of 1984: Without a worry in the world, Kenneth and Theres sit at the roadside singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". Tourists toss coins into the young man's cap – enough money to even phone back home to England. But Kenneth gets devastating news: his mother has had a serious accident. Head over heels, the son returns home. A horrible time awaits him. His mother is in the hospital with no hope of recovery, and his father is suffering severe vision problems. Kenneth, who dreams of a career as a musician, takes drugs and, at the request of his father, procures morphine – to put his mother out of her misery.

The TV shows the opening of the Hungarian-Austrian border for the refugees fleeing the German Democratic Republic. Theres, who has finished her studies and wants to become a teacher, gets an internship in Berlin in 1989. Together with her small son, she leaves for the city.

Thirty years later: Ariane is an actress in Berlin, and her marriage is on the rocks. At her request, her husband David, a renowned anthropologist, moves out of their joint home; he moves into an apartment close to the new central train station. From there, he watches a film shoot with his lost wife – and he sees a homeless man with a dog lying at the entrance to the suburban rail. When Theres passes the homeless man, she recognizes him as her former boyfriend Kenneth. They look at each other in silence, and then she continues on without saying a word.

THE DREAMED PATH is an irritating, disturbing work which, at least at first glance, does not reveal the secrets of its protagonists; much remains unsaid, especially when it comes to the ascetic, austere, sometimes even fragmentary dialogue. The images, down to the seemingly extraneous sequences and shots, are more important than any word spoken. At the beginning, when Theres and Kenneth are singing on the street in Greece – just three years after the Greece joined the EU – the optimistic atmosphere of change is still in the air: street demos confidently proclaim a "new era" for the country. Today, we know that the expectations were not met – no more than those of the refugees from East Germany that crossed the border between Hungary and Austria, or Kenneth's dreams of a career as a musician. THE DREAMED PATH tells a story of frustrated hopes. Occasionally an inserted image alone clarifies the protagonists, for example when an only apparently unrelated shot is inserted showing an idyllic pasture with horses and bodies of water: a topos of peace and longing, and a counter-image to the street scenes around Hauptbahnhof, Berlin's central station.

"Constructed with the utmost precision […], Schanelec's rigorously austere aesthetic has the effect that any departure – a music cue, an aberrant camera movement, a single tear bursting through a face's stony façade – is amplified to earth-shattering proportions".(Filmmaker Magazine)

Angela Schanelec's directorial approach uses images to determine the narrative of her episodic drama of stations in life. "I think it has to do with fondness, with my fondness of the characters in my screenplays, and I sense when an actor makes it possible for me to feel that fondness." Without this empathy, THE DREAMED PATH would be hard to bear. It is a painful work about inevitable human suffering. Towards the end, after the futile reencounter of Theres and Kenneth, the camera directs its focus on a train platform. An inter-city express hurtles through the frame. After the train exits the frame, the view falls to a single shoe on the platform. This, too, is a way to tell of the pain of a suicide – it also then becomes clear why, at the start of the movie, the director continually showed close-ups of Kenneth's shoes. In doing so, she dissects and fragmentizes her sequences into unusually many separate and individual shots, into close-ups and extreme close-ups. This way "the staging of the scene happens with the cuts and the sequencing of shots, and due to the excerpt-like quality of the film I was forced to shoot considerably more takes." (Angela Schanelec)

Production Country
Germany (DE), Greece (GR), United Kingdom (GB)
Production Period
2015/2016
Production Year
2016
color
color
Aspect Ratio
1:1,33

Duration
Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)
Type
Feature Film
Genre
Drama
Topic
Love, Relationship / Family, Europe, Psychology, Music, Precarity, Illness / Addiction / Physical impairment

Scope of Rights
Nichtexklusive nichtkommerzielle öffentliche Aufführung (nonexclusive, noncommercial public screening),Keine TV-Rechte (no TV rights)
Notes to the Licence

Licence Period
14.12.2026
Permanently Restricted Areas
Germany (DE), Austria (AT), Switzerland (CH), Liechtenstein (LI), Alto Adige, Brazil (BR)

Available Media
DVD, Blu-ray Disc
Original Version
German (de)

DVD

Subtitles
German (partly), German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Arabic (ar), Czech (cs), Lithuanian (lt)

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles
German (partly), German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Arabic (ar), Czech (cs), Lithuanian (lt)