Director: Antonio Padovani, Producer: Salvatore Matranga, Production: Latteplus, Germany, Language: English, 5′, 2021, Rights: World
A cold Berlin night, Maya decides to reveal her love to Stella. Despite her interest, Stella is forced to refuse because of her amazing secret.
Wonders of Berlin, a sentimental lesbo drama set in the inclusive frame of the German capital. Be enchanted by the characteristic both social and intimate atmosphere of a typical Berlin pub, where a love story could always end in unexpected ways.
Latteplus has always loved to mixture social drama with unusual genres. This time the director Antonio Padovani inserts a fantastic and decisive element that twists the end of a very touching and gentle love story between two regular girls during a regular cold night in a regular Berlin pub.
CAST
Judith Shoemaker & Myra Eetgerink
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
I have always been fascinated by LGBT stories and the courage shown in the ongoing struggles (personal and social) that members of this community have been fighting for decades. In Wonders of Berlin I imagined a world where these battles have been completely overcome and in which even the need for a definition of normality has been made superfluous (as it would be for bread, air, a rose…). The film’s characters fall in love and kiss in a public setting where the only fear left is the one that characterises any person (of any gender, age, background, religion…) when they wonder if their feelings are reciprocated: a pleasant thrill, inextricably linked to the feeling of love.
Being judged, in the microcosm of the Berlin pub that forms the backdrop to the story, is not taken into consideration in the slightest. This is the wonder expressed in the title. The fantastic element present in the final shots helps, by contrast, to bring out this aspect.
I asked the composer to create music that could plausibly be played on the radio in a typical Berlin pub (electronic-melodic) and at the same time act as a counterpoint to the emotional turmoil of the protagonist. The digital electronic composition and the classical piano performance are fused in a harmonious contrast that is absolutely unprecedented, and the dynamic mixing with the other tracks of the soundtrack expresses perfectly all the inner complexity of the character.
I chose Berlin as the place to set the story both because of the affection I have for this city and because I believe it to be one of the most likely places where such a cultural redemption could primarily take place. The trust I place in this polyglot and multicultural community is honoured by the film’s title.
DIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Antonio Padovani graduated in 2010 in History of Cinema at the university of Roma Tre and then worked for three years as a screenwriter and editor in some Italian productions. In 2014 he attended the Basic Direction Course at the Experimental Centre of Cinematography. He works as Assistant Director on several films and television sets in Berlin, where he has been living since 2012. Under the brand Latteplus, of which he is a founding partner since 2017, he produces films of various genres and formats (short, feature, fiction, documentary and