Nackte Tiere (2020)

Naked Animals follows five teenage friends trying to cope with everyday life together. Katja, Sascha, Benni, Laila, and Schöller are growing up in the middle of nowhere in the provinces. A driver’s license is the key to freedom and, with it, acceptance. The shifting interplay of mutual attraction and keeping one another at a distance, of closeness and distance, violence, love, and loneliness shapes the relationships among the five young people, for whom closeness also means pain. Katja, a jujitsu fighter, is 17 and constantly battling her own weakness. All five want to hold on to their peer group, their family of friends, where they live by their own rules. In the safety of the group, they believe they can conquer the world, and with the group’s support they take punches without flinching. But they have only one winter left together before finishing school, after which they will have to choose whether to stay in their town or move to the next larger city. The pain of separation hangs over them, along with the prospect of setting out into an unknown world. For Katja, it will be a painful and bloody farewell.