Anna (Katharina Marie Schubert) recently lost her job as an actor at the City Theatre and must file for unemployment. At the JobCentre, her keen case worker Ms. Schnallenberger has a brilliant idea: Anna can jump in at the last minute to offer a theater workshop as a training measure until the computers have arrived for the actual course. But neither Anna nor the colourful cross-section of participants enrolled for the training course are all that interested in the idea but thy have no choice. The group works its way forward from the standard theatre warm-up and ice-breaker games to Antigone. But when Ms. Schnallenberger takes away their rehearsal room, they decide to continue in Mr. Hubert's woodshop. For Oliver Haffner this is no great triumph over circumstances let alone a successful exit from unemployment. His down-to-earth story stays at the level of the everyday, told from the perspective of spending time together and the joy of working on a collective project. Whether in the end the performance is good or bad is not really the point. EIN GESCHENK DER GÖTTER is good cinema with lots of humour. Haffner likes all of his characters and he knows and loves theatre. The theatre scenes with Tini Prüfert as the horrible rival and Bernd Grawert as the phony artistic director are some of the funniest in the film. For this film, Oliver Haffner won the audience award at the Munich Film Festival.

Hendrike Bake