Velours Rouge PRESENTS
CIGARETTES AFTER SEX
After a positive pregnancy test, 17-year-old Alex wants to carry on as normal. But how should she explain it to her steady girlfriend?
Length
30 min
Language
German
Genre
Drama, Coming of Age
Status
Post-production
Written and directed by
Fynn Behrendt
Producer
Philipp Machill
DoP
Daniel Arlt
Music
Kolja Porschke
Production design
Mara Wüst
Costume design
Shima Choukri
Executive Producer
Florian Frerichs
Fynn Behrendt
LEAD CAST
SYNOPSIS
Alex is 17 years old attending year 11 at a grammar school in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg (trendy gentrified neighborhood). As she tries to have an everyday conversation with her girlfriend Mia on the way to school, she is carrying a big secret: she is pregnant.
While Alex tries to go about her everyday life as normal – school, meeting friends and selling a bit of weed, Mia’s suspicions that something is wrong with Alex increase. As her past catches up with her, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep her tangled web of half-truths together.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Fynn Behrendt: For me, Cigarettes after Sex (AT) is a story that captures the unique stage of life between 16 and 18. You’re still a teenager, but you’re confronted more and more with adult problems. These problems often feel unsolvable.
How are you supposed to come up with a rational solution in a a critical situation if you don’t even know who you are?
At this stage of life, your microcosm feels like the whole world. Your friends, your school, your relationship – everything seems so vast that any problem affecting your status in that very microcosm feels so overwhelming and ultimate, as if the whole thing is about to collapse. And what comes after that? You don’t have anything to compare it to…
This strong feeling of losing control is very intimidating and can therefore quickly lead to quite irrational and chaotic decisions.
Cigarettes after Sex (AT) takes up autobiographical experiences, including stories that I witnessed in my youth in St. Pauli.
My main character Alex doesn’t really know who she is yet and she lacks the self-confidence needed to deal with challenging situations and mistakes. She does have an idea of her own morals and values, but she is also afraid of the consequences of her actions and that she might have to ask herself uncomfortable questions about herself.
So she opts for denial and thus embarks on a path that constantly creates new problems out of an already awkward situation and is therefore inevitably doomed to failure.