Having presented stylized cinema in recent years, Angela Schanelec’s new film is a drama. A wife who suffered an unfortunate ordeal cries on a bench; hearing her story, her husband feels as if his head might explode and collapses in the street. The acting style is striking: facial expressions avoid exaggeration, physical movements are minimized, and voices seem to emanate not from psychological interiority, but from pure physicality. During dialogue scenes, when an actor speaks lines across several minutes as if delivering a solitary monologue, it sends chills down the spine. Furthermore, the duration of the shots, the attitude toward the landscape, the use of on-location sound, and the minimalist spaces set this work apart from conventional dramas. Perhaps, My Wife Cries is a tribute to the late Jean-Marie Straub, who passed away during this period. Because this is a truly materialist film, even a crane moving slowly through the air cannot be regarded with indifference. Even so, an unexpected scene accompanied by a Leonard Cohen’s song suggests that this is not merely an austere film. It is a work of both tension and deep emotion.
Programme note by LEE Yong Cheol
Stills5
Screenings2
Sun, 10/11
12:4014:12
LOTTE CINEMA Centum City 9
450KE, Korean subtitles + English subtitles or English dialogue
Tue, 10/13
17:3019:02
CGV Centum City 4
588KE, Korean subtitles + English subtitles or English dialogue
Born in southern Germany in 1962, Angela Schanelec studied acting in Frankfurt before working as a stage actress at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg and the Schaubühne in Berlin. She went on to study film directing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) from 1990 to 1995. Currently a professor of narrative film at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK), she has also translated several Shakespeare plays into German. As a leading figure of the Berlin School, Schanelec earned invitations to the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival with Places in Cities (1998) and Marseille (2004). She is a two-time Silver Bear winner at the Berlin International Film Festival, taking Best Director for I Was at Home, But... (2019) and Best Screenplay for Music (2023), her reinterpretation of the Oedipus myth. Her latest film, My Wife Cries, made its world premiere in the Competition section of the 2026 Berlinale, competing for the Golden Bear. Characterized by static, restrained formalism that observes human behavior with minimal intervention, this aesthetic has remained the defining hallmark of her cinematic universe for over two decades.
From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31
