Risse im Fundament (2022)

Eva, a talented and ambitious German architecture student, is doing an internship in Vienna with the influential architect Andreas Hummel. Fascinated by Eva’s ideas, he assigns her and a young female colleague the design of a pavilion for an art park. At first, he is very impressed by the results. Then he begins to approach Eva in a personal way, inviting her to dinner and taking her along on business trips, for example. Eventually, he tells her outright that he is in love with her. Eva, who has just been left by her boyfriend, is visibly confused by this turn of events, but continues to work well on the project she has been assigned; she is able to keep her professional and private lives strictly separate. The rift comes during a trip with Andreas to visit his friend, the artist Erwin Hohlbein. At dinner, Hohlbein openly expresses misogynistic views—for instance, that an underage girl who was raped and takes legal action against her attacker must have been after his money from the outset. Eva’s uncertainty about Andreas turns to dislike, especially when he becomes intrusive after drinking alcohol and taking drugs. Despite Hohlbein’s offer of a guest room, she insists that they leave for home immediately, takes Andreas to his apartment, and then leaves him alone. The next morning, he takes revenge by sweeping her presentation of her design off the table in front of all the assembled colleagues. Her friends advise Eva to swallow her pride and apologize to Andreas for the ruined evening, regardless of how she herself sees things. She cannot bring herself to ignore her own feelings to that extent. This makes her realize that building a career in the male-dominated world of her dream profession will be much harder than she had thought: she will have to be good at her work, but also, as a woman, play the roles that more powerful men expect of her. She goes home in tears.