Philip Widmann, Germany 2014

A briefcase is opened to reveal the documentation of the lives of one middle-class man named Hans who is having an affair with his secretary Monika. Hans has clinically written about the many times he has met with Monika including short descriptions of what the sex was like and what Monika’s mood was at the time. The filmmakers have filled out these statements with statistical data about the life of average men and women in 1970’s Cologne.
At first Szenario seems bizarre and jarring, but as the film progresses the statistics help to form the personalities of Hans, Monika and their significant others. By the end, it becomes clear that this is a scathingly ironic and sly analysis of the female gender roles in Germany in the 1970s. It is truly a genuinely fascinating anthropological study of a statistical past. (Rose Finlay)