Title: Sometimes, I Imagine Them All at a Party
Foreign Title: Was an Empfindsamkeit bleibt
Year: 2026
Country: Germany
Language: In German and Portuguese with English subtitles
Director: Daniela Magnani Hüller
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Daniela Magnani Hüller explores a harrowing incident from her past in this sobering documentary. In late high school, she was harassed and then brutally stabbed by a male classmate. It was a clear case of attempted murder, and she has lived to tell the tale; it is one that involves negligence on the part of school authorities and deeply questionable lenience on the part of the German justice system. Sometimes, I Imagine Them All at a Party is no simple screed, however: though it holds to a firm moral position, it finds room for contemplation and even dreamy reverie.
Hüller shoots digitally and on 16mm film stock, and the film jumps between different frame dimensions throughout. The visual whimsy can sometimes feel gratuitous, but the director never fails to circle back from her filmic explorations to the heart of the matter: survival and justice in a patriarchal society. This is an intelligent and provocative film; its hushed atmosphere surrounds a core of anger, and that anger is justified to say the least.
