Gavagai — German Film Festival 2026

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https://germanfilmfestival.com.au

Date Reviewed: 29/04/2026

There is something elusive at the heart of Gavagai, and perhaps that is precisely its point. Ulrich Köhler’s meta-cinematic drama moves in layers — film within film, performance within performance, intimacy folding into politics — yet never quite settles into one emotional register. It circles questions of race, authorship, desire and power with a cool, restless intelligence, even as it occasionally feels as though it is withholding its own pulse.

The film opens at sea, with an almost dreamlike disorientation: a beach, a boat, a knife, children mistaken for corpses. Before we can orient ourselves, a voice interrupts and we realise we are on a film set. It’s a clever opening sleight of hand. Illusion is destabilised from the first frame.

On the Senegalese set of a revisionist Medea, Köhler immediately foregrounds tensions between image-making and exploitation. Extras, mostly locals, complain of being treated as disposable — fed scraps, left in the heat, reduced to scenery. One haunting figure, a woman dressed as a bride with half her body appearing raw and burnt, seems to drift almost like a wound made visible. Even before the central romance takes shape, Gavagai is interested in who gets framed, who gets spoken for, and who remains peripheral.

There is an appealing strangeness to the film-within-the-film: part ancient tragedy, part futuristic ruin, part colonial fever dream. Jet skis appear alongside mythic robes. Plastic bags sit beside ritual landscapes. It has the logic of something half-remembered or mistranslated. At times it resembles a kind of Mad Max Medea, which is as strange as it sounds.

At its centre is Maja (Maren Eggert), an actress quietly disillusioned by the bourgeois roles she keeps being offered, and Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly), her co-star, whose presence often feels more alive than the film around him. Their affair begins in blue hotel-room shadows, rehearsed dialogue slipping into seduction, performance becoming intimacy. Or something like intimacy.

And yet this is where the film remains intriguingly frustrating. I kept asking: where is the love story? There is closeness, certainly — loneliness, projection, perhaps even tenderness — but I was less convinced by passion. Their connection feels suspended, ambiguous, almost abstract. Maybe that is deliberate; perhaps Köhler is less interested in romance than in the idea of people performing love while inhabiting unequal structures of privilege and precarity.

What held me more was Nourou’s storyline in Berlin, where the film sharpens into something more urgent. A racist incident with hotel security shifts the atmosphere entirely. Suddenly the film is not just about a fractured affair or self-conscious filmmaking, but about surveillance, exclusion and the instability of belonging. These scenes have a different charge.

One of the film’s most unsettling moments arrives during a press conference when the director Caroline, played with brittle opacity by Nathalie Richard, morphs in Nourou’s perception into an elephant-headed figure — absurd, surreal, faintly comic, yet also menacing. It feels like the film briefly mutates into fever dream. Not all of these surreal gestures fully land, but I admired the risk.

Visually, there are moments of real beauty. A stationary shot from inside a rain-speckled car outside the premiere lingers with quiet precision. Raindrops blur into little halos as celebrity performance unfolds beyond the glass. It is one of several moments where Köhler’s stillness becomes expressive rather than inert.

Because there are stretches where the stillness risks becoming stasis. Some scenes — particularly the press conference and portions of the film-within-the-film — feel almost too rigid, too deliberately awkward. I found myself wanting more friction, more formal instability. Even the climactic violence of the Medea sequence — which should feel mythic and feral — is staged so statically it loses some visceral force. I kept imagining what handheld urgency or a more chaotic camera might have brought to those scenes.

Still, the film is intellectually provocative in the way it folds racial politics into myth. The parallels between Medea’s betrayal and contemporary structures of exclusion hover without being overdetermined. And the sequence involving Nourou leaving the premiere to confront the dismissed security guard carries a real dread — the sense of social performance slipping toward something dangerous.

If Gavagai occasionally feels emotionally remote, it is also because it seems suspicious of emotional clarity itself. Love is uncertain. Political solidarity is compromised. Art-making is implicated. Nobody emerges innocent.

And perhaps that is why the final image lingers: children drifting in a boat as water splashes over their faces, accompanied by a soft English voiceover speaking of love. It is beautiful, eerie, unresolved — much like the film itself.

I admired Gavagai more than I was moved by it. Its ideas often fascinated me more than its romance convinced me. I was especially drawn to the way it explores racism and performance, though I found the central relationship strangely muted, and at times the film’s deliberate slowness drifted toward detachment.

But even in my ambivalence, there is much to think through here. It is an imperfect but intriguing work — politically alert, formally curious, and often productively strange.