Any film that opens with an advance warning about throbbing strobe lights promises to be a wild ride at least. The debut feature by young writer-director Juri Padel, Junk Space Berlin is a retro-futuristic cyberpunk thriller with one foot in a neon-lit sci-fi computer-game dystopia and another in the German capital’s fabled techno club scene. Judged as conventional screen drama, it is pretentious, amateurish and uneven. On the other hand it is also rich in ideas, stylistically adventurous and ablaze with cutting-edge visual glitch-art effects. A mess, but an admirably ambitious, sense-blitzing mess.
Padel has a background in theatre, notably the prestigious Schaubühne and Volksbühne in Berlin. Indeed, he initially conceived Junk Space Berlin as a multimedia stage play in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It still has the feel of an experimental theatre piece, with its stagey sets and mannered dialogue. World premiering at the defiantly independent Oldenburg Film Festival this week, this lo-fi queer-punk junk-space odyssey is unlikely to travel beyond specialist niche-interest circles. Even so, in the week of Jean-Luc Godard’s death, it is heartening to see young film-makers still making the kind of avant-garde manifesto movies that he pioneered, for all their flaws and limitations.
The streets of Berlin are rarely glimpsed in Junk Space Berlin, which mostly takes place in the grungy subterranean depths of a mysterious chasm that has opened up in the city, ripping the Neukölln district in half. When Billie (played by real-life Berlin techno DJ and recording artist Tommi Tokyo, aka Tot Onyx) disappears into this ghostly digital no man’s land beyond the reach of social media or phone signals, a trio of anxious friends and hackers set off on a perilous mission try and track her down. Marion (Otiti Engelhardt), Blue (Tamara Semzov) and Akira (Selin Kavak) also reluctantly consent to cooperate with Bird (Thomas Schimanski), Blue’s arrogant and abusive ex-lover, a former state security agent who may hold some clues to Billie’s location. This risky excursion into an enigmatic forbidden zone has distant echoes of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), which may be intentional.
Junk Space Berlin is low on action but heavy on talk, political slogans and big ideas. There are recurring references to the trio entering the “marginal deviation of reality”, for example, alongside esoteric theories like the notion that Schumann Resonances, low frequency electromagnetic waves in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, can alter human mood and behaviour. These concepts add little to Padel’s scrambled, time-jumping, patchwork narrative, mostly serving as a kind of random intellectual scenery.
In classic Brechtian style, Padel’s characters frequently break the fourth wall to monologue directly to camera, further underscoring the film’s original conception as a stage play. Also woven into the dialogue are quotes from radical hipster-leftist texts including The Coming Insurrection, an apocalyptic critique of capitalism published by anonymous French anarchist group The Invisible Committee in 2007, and Legacy Russell’s 2020 book Glitch Feminism, which champions disruptions in the digital mediascape as potentially liberating for maginalised, queer, black, female and non-binary people. A very Godardian essay-film touch.
The widening chasm that runs through this fictionalised city also plays a rich metaphorical role, echoing the old Berlin Wall but also the gentrification that has recently become a divisive issue in the German capital, rendering former low-rent bohemian neighbourhoods like Neukölln unaffordable to most locals. Many of the script’s in-jokes will only make sense to viewers familiar with Berlin’s cultural and architectural landmarks, including the controversially reconstructed Humboldt Forum, the riverside Ankerkaluse restaurant and the legendary techno club Berghain.
Junk Space Berlin ultimately has more overcooked ideas than its modest, partially crowd-funded budget can handle. Padel’s inexperience as a film-maker, working with a cast of theatre actors and non-professionals, inevitably creates some rough edges and jarring tonal wobbles. That said, the digital glitch-punk visuals are trippy, hypnotic and eerily beautiful, elevating the film to a higher aesthetic level. The score, mostly electronic dance music played by Tommi Tokyo herself, with additional songs by “slut punk” band Lucie and the Sluts, is an enjoyably buzzy complement to all this visual noise. As coherent drama, Junk Space Berlin barely holds together. But as a blazing assault on the senses, it offers a dazzling trip through the looking glass.
Director, producer: Juri Padel
Screenplay: Vera Schindler, Juri Padel
Cast:Tamara Semzov, Thomas Schimanski, Otiti Engelhardt, Selin Kavak, Tommi Tokyo, Carolin Haupt, Komi Togbonou, Marta Sroka, Mano Thiravong
Cinematography: Florian Baumgarten, Moritz von Dungern
Editing: Florian Klein
Motion graphic design: Lukas Hertlein
Set design: Anna Kur
Graphic design: Carmen Reina
Music: Tot Onyx, N. Klein
Production company, world sales: JC Productions (Germany)
In German
108 minutes
