Alice, 18, comes from the countryside. She moves in with her father Max, a photographer, and his new family in the suburbs. The family consists of stepmother Siri, a radiant feminist building a career within the UN, and two half-brothers: Michael, a peer to Alice, and the idolized, broken “Prince” – two years younger, set to play the lead in the Free Amateur Theatre’s production of Hamlet, staged in an abandoned, occupied industrial hall nearby.
Alice takes the bus into the city and starts building herself a life. The Evening School, the Free University, the Film Archive, Veronica Seger’s apartment where legendary parties are held, the streets of the city – all of this is about to become hers. And the people: Veronica, who teaches her to write like a little animal; Pelle, who becomes her boyfriend; and Evelyn, a rejected poet and dancer in a performance group.
It is 1976/77. “The Ice Age,” says Siri, who remembers another time, full of struggle and political conviction. A time that would later be referred to as “the most peaceful postwar years.”
That’s a lie: in Germany, a war is being fought against a self-proclaimed urban guerrilla movement, sending ripples throughout the entire continent. Violence creeps in, fear eats its way through – paint the town dread paint the town dread – and the dollhouse existence crumbles in the most brutal way imaginable.
Nowhere Land / Women in Revolt is the first part of a trilogy. It is about being so young that life is a horizon of possibilities and resistance, about what it takes to become an artist, and what stories one tells when nothing has yet happened.
