Directed by Christian Zübert
KINO!Fest 2016: NYC

A fleeting distraction; a few seconds when your vigilance relaxes. That’s all it takes for your world to be shattered and the lives of others to be destroyed. It’s an experience Elena grapples with when, in an unguarded moment, the child she’s minding disappears into thin air.

With heart-pounding terror, Elena frantically searches for Lotte, the little girl in her care. She had left her outside a shop on a busy street in a stroller for only a brief time, returning to find her gone. Difficult as it may be, most people in the same circumstances would immediately call the police for assistance and inform the child’s mother. Elena does neither. Instead, she too disappears. But the reasons motivating Elena’s seemingly callous reaction are complex.

Elena is from Greece. She left her home, her family and her boyfriend to find better-paid work in Frankfurt. She begins working for Tessa and Jan, a well-off professional couple with high-pressured careers in need of a full-time nanny. But Elena struggles with the workload and meeting Tessa’s high demands. She needs the work more than ever after she discovers she’s pregnant and has no health insurance coverage in Germany. But when Lotte is taken, Elena’s knee-jerk response is to immediately flee. She secretively returns home.
The film’s focus then shifts to Tessa who, having little faith in the local police to find her child, flies to Athens in search of Elena, believing she holds the key to Lotte’s abduction. Faced with a wall of suspicion and apathy from Greek officials and law enforcement, Tessa begins to unravel.

Seen through the lens of today’s toxic Greco-German relationship, ONE BREATH offers a richly thought-provoking political allegory.

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