Weitermachen Sanssouci

Music and Apocalypse

The Institute for Cybernetics and Simulation Research is threatened with closure – the starting point for this satire about how the university system is to be transformed into a turbo-capitalist research machine. Phoebe Phaidon, a highly qualified, up-and-coming young academic, accepts yet another temporary teaching contract. With her progressive ideals on climate research still more or less intact, she acts as a link to the frustrated, yet combat-ready students who have occupied the library. On the other side of the battle lines are the established faculty, whose will to survive in the cesspool of third-party funding acquisition has ground them down into vain cynics for whom no ridiculous concession to evaluation madness is too grotesque.

Max Linz crafts his film with a keen sense of Berlin’s sensitivities, urban backdrops, office décor and academic attire. And he exaggerates decadent university jargon with gusto, its buzzwords functioning almost like the bait in behavioural studies. By the end, the film has practically become a musical, with a catchy tune that could be a post-capitalist revolutionary anthem: “Why can’t it be nice here, why are we not happy?”

Source: 69. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)