Adam is 15, bullied by his schoolmates and ignored by the girl of his dreams. His grandmother, who has teased him all his life with nasty remarks about his appearance, uses her dying breath to bring home to him once more his supposed physical shortcomings. Even the prospect of the upcoming summer holidays hardly raises Adam’s spirits, because his father has organised several unpleasant holiday jobs for him to build his character. On top of everything else, the teasing and negative comments manifest in Adam in strange deformations of his body which provoke additional stress and ridicule.

Adam is different. He stays outside while the people around him go about their usual – their “normal” – activities. He watches his sister being cheated on by her boyfriend, must bear a neighbour’s fanatical lawn care accuracy and discovers that a resident of his street throws bags of dog faeces up into the branches of the alley trees. The more the daily madness around him becomes evident, the more Adam emerges as an empathetic and mature young adult. Contrary to all claims he, whom the others regard as a strange eccentric, is in control of his life.

A dimly lit, scarcely furnished flat, the hissing and buzzing of an open microphone. What follows is an argument in Arabic between mother and son. She complains about his lethargy. He sees no point in school while the country is at war. At last, the boy sets out through the busy streets of his neighbourhood which is a chaotic patchwork of everyday life and the debris of war.
Using 3D graphics software, Husein Bastouni reconstructs from his personal memories the situation in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in the south of Damascus when the area found itself between the frontlines in the Syrian war. Visually and acoustically – indeed, almost olfactorily – his film draws you into this world from the first second with terrifying immediacy, and yet poetically. In a moment of shock, the rhythm slows down, the images become sparser, but the protagonist’s reflections become crystal clear. In the silence of thought, the eye glides like a deep-sea diver through a sunken city and a lost home.

“I don’t want to say it out loud, but my flat’s lower down,” the narrator remarks. The camera at first follows her legs climbing up the stairs of the hallway. That is all we see of her. Very soon, her gaze determines our perspective in this unsettling story. At first it all sounds like a mistake, but at some point, the tenant gets used to the fact that in some inexplicable way and completely unceremoniously she is pulled down from the fourth floor to the coal cellar, floor by floor. A decline that the neighbourhood lets happen in deafening silence.

The “falling” protagonist’s irritated soliloquy, sometimes resigned, often full of calculated optimism, is accompanied by charcoal drawings. Their clarity and architectural detail – down to the curlicued decorations of the upper-class mansion – gradually fade over the course of events. The spatial representation becomes more and more vague and is reduced to a few strokes, only to dissolve into soft areas of charcoal dust in the end. In this nightmarish story, reality no longer offers any support, only one’s own ego. Susi Jirkuff has adapted Ilse Aichinger’s eponymous, multilayered story, which was first published in the mid-1950s, with a remarkable urgency that demonstrates the topicality of Aichinger’s text and writing.