For very few people, life is one long, calm river. For Rona, it's even as gruelling as the waves crashing on the shores of her home on the Orkney Islands. Instead of studying in faraway London, she has been living it up excessively in the bars of the metropolis. Rona has now returned to the Orkneys to detox.

"The Outrun" is based on the memoirs of Amy Liptrot, who also co-wrote the screenplay with director Nora Fingscheidt. In a tour de force, Saoirse Ronan lives through Rona's odyssey, which is composed like a mosaic of time and place.

Nora Fingscheidt
Nora Fingscheidt, born in Braunschweig in 1983, makes her feature film debut with her youth drama "Systemsprenger", which is as loud as it is sensitive. It was not only screened in competition at the 2019 Berlinale, but also honoured with the Alfred Bauer Prize. It was precisely this flair for difficult characters that drew the attention of actress Saoirse Ronan to Fingscheidt, who had recently secured the film rights to Amy Liptrot's "The Outrun". From July to September 2022, Fingscheidt and Ronan will be filming Rona's story in the original locations.

In the beginning, there was primordial ooze bubbling away. Several million years later, there is a house with a living room and a large window. in 1945, the newly married Youngs move in, have four children and a television, become grandparents and grow old. "Here" tells its stories from a single perspective, without pans, cuts or zooms. Instead, the images overlap, jumping back and forth in time, making Tom Hanks and Robin Wright look younger than they did 30 years ago in "Forrest Gump". AI makes it possible.

Robert Zemeckis
Like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, director Robert Zemeckis, born in Chicago in 1952, is one of Hollywood's successful inventors. Long before he enrolled at the School of Cinematic Arts in California, he experimented with his father's Super 8 camera. A good 20 years later, this led to the adventure comedy "In Search of the Green Diamond", the "Back to the Future" trilogy from 1985 and the Oscar for Best Director for "Forrest Gump" in 1995. Since then, Zemeckis has directed 13 more feature films, including "Contact" (1997) and "Cast Away" (2000).

Wim Wenders from Düsseldorf can look back on more than 50 years of filmmaking. He has selected ten feature films for the latest "Best of Wim Wenders" DVD box set, whereby he says he has taken a highly subjective approach:

"Alice in the Cities" (1974), "In the Course of Time" (1976), "The American Friend" (1977), "The State of Things" (1982), "Paris, Texas" (1984), "The Sky Over Berlin" (1987), "Lisbon Story" (1994), "At the End of Violence" (1997), "The Million Dollar Hotel" (2008) and his most recent drama "Perfect Days", which was entered into the Oscar race for Japan this year. All ten films tell as much about the times in which they were made as they do about the times in which they were made.

Where is that whisper coming from? Hasn't something just moved? These are questions that certainly arise when playing "Fear the Spotlight". Mildly creepy in a coarse pixelated 90s retro look is the motto, at least visually. However, the spooky scandal that Vivian discovers in the school building at night after her friend Amy suddenly disappears is deeply 2024. "Fear the Spotlight" is the first game to be published by Blumhouse Games, the sales department founded by horror film producer Jason Blum ("Get Out", "We", "Speak No Evil").