Interview: Ulrich Köhler – In My Room

Coming seven years after 2011’s Sleeping Sickness (Schlafkrankheit) and his longest time off between features, after his feverish study of settler psychology in West Africa, Ulrich Köhler premiered In the Room at the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section. A disquieting, wonderfully imagined essay on survivalism, here the filmmaker examines second chances via a man-child during a human apocalypse. Defined by its taciturn characters and ambiguity, this falls somewhere within the utopian subgenre of recent studio efforts Divergent to Elysium, and art-house output of Snowpiercer and Love at First Fight (2014). In My Room deals with the hypothetical and refreshingly makes the argument for an alternative / different society that feels authentically in symbiosis with current returning ways of the past. I had the chance to sit with Kohler and find out how notions of utopia and dystopia intersect, his working method with his actor set, and the role that the landscape plays within the text.