Model Olimpia
Meticulously crafted, this debut explores the duality of dark desires within an adolescent mind and helicopter parenting of a mother.
A desperate woman (Anna Steffens) has designed a strange plan to help her son. The young man (played by Alban Mondschein) suffers from a destructive fantasy life revolving around death and violence. In order to change these disturbing obsessions, he engages in his mother’s self-devised therapy programme.
Relationship between human beings are distorted here into subject-object relations, opening up a space for reflection on nature vs. nurture topics or mental disease. Venturing into more horrific territory later on, Hambalek explores a mother-son relationship and its dark secrets with aesthetic consequence, candor and courage.
The film will be screened at PÖFF First Feature Competiton Programme.
Christoph Gröner
Frédéric Hambalek (b. 1986) majored in film studies and American studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. As a writer he won the Tankred Dorst Award of the “Drehbuchwerkstatt München” with his script "One Man's Happiness". The TV movie, produced for ZDF, would go on to be nominated for the Grimme Award and was followed by scripts for the TV series "4 Blocks" and the TV movie "Jackpot". "Model Olimpia" is his first feature film.
Programme presented by
Award for the best film, grant of 5000€ by
