Container

“A woman in a man’s body. A man in a woman’s body. Jesus in Mary’s stomach. The water breaks. It floods into me. I can’t close the lid. My heart is full.” So runs Lukas Moodysson’s description of his film that features a female voice - the soft-spoken Suada. This film is about Brad Pitt and Paris Hilton, David Beckham and Saddam Hussein; it also about sex and the war in Iraq, about homosexuality and homophobia. Descriptions of a full life led more in the realm of fantasy than in reality are accompanied by black and white images. The high contrast, grainy images show a man and a woman going about tasks that are far from routine; interactions that, in sum, do not so much add up to a story as a series of environments. Photographic collages are interspersed with semi-documentary scenes reminiscent of fluxus art of the 1960s, when – as the film also shows – all good commune-dwellers had group sex. “I, the undersigned,” states Luka Moodysson, “hereby state that CONTAINER is a film about the little darling that lives inside all of us. I hope seven people will take it to their hearts; one per year that has passed since I showed my first film here in Berlin. During those seven years every cell in my body has been replaced. I am new. I am the same. I am happy to be back.”