A classroom with only one name tag. Knowing the world capitals securing future presidency. Father analyzing the punchlines of his jokes while wearing a clown mask. Mother following the commands of an extraterrestrial leader that resides in a gaping wound on her leg. A 30 year old man playing a child. All this happens in Nikias Chryssos’ debut, a masterpiece of absurd cinema. Chryssos depicts an off-beat world with much poise and originality. A student moves in to a bunker cellar with a family who celebrate the markers of petit bourgeois squareness. The student needs to be left alone to finish his scientific work but is also forced to become a teacher who needs to cram all the necessary knowledge into the son’s brain so he can become the future president. So decrees Heinrich, the ruler who lives in mom’s leg. The first layer of this outrageous plot is a portrait of a neurotically uptight bourgeois world with a compulsive fixation on education – but this film can’t be reduced to such banal satire. It’s a synesthetic experience that merges banality and cheesiness, intelligence and aestheticism, nonsense and mystery. An incredible delight.

Harald Mühlbeyer

Translation: Elinor Lewy