Plattenbau Sommer
Best short, Rhine Independent 2026. Official selection, Nocturne Shorts Week 2026.
The programmer's note
Programmed for the stairwell scenes, which carry more information per minute than most features manage. Weiss-Lindqvist grew up in one of these blocks and shoots them without nostalgia or pity, which is rarer than it should be. Aurelie Mbeki shot it, and you can feel two filmmakers agreeing to stay wide. Watch the Thursday woman. She is in three scenes, she explains nothing, and she is the reason the last ten minutes work.
The film
Jette is seventeen. Her mother has been caretaker for two eleven-storey blocks in Hellersdorf since Jette was four, which means there is a board in the hallway with sixty-eight keys on it, and Jette knows exactly which flats are between tenants. In June she starts letting them, quietly, at ten euro an hour: to a couple who both live with parents, to a boy who wants somewhere to practise drums, to a woman who says only that she needs four hours on Thursdays. Weiss-Lindqvist films the block as a vertical village, all balconies and stairwells and the particular light of an east Berlin summer at nine in the evening. The business works until it collides with the thing Jette did not price in, which is that the empty flats are empty because people left them. The second half is quieter than the first, and the last scene is a conversation between a mother and a daughter about what the keys are actually for.
