“Zicaden” in the cinema – rapprochement into avenues

Summer in Brandenburg: Isabell (Nina Hoss) tries to bring order to your parents’ weekend house. She clears up in this light -flooded, spacious bungalow, which her father, a renowned architect, has designed herself. Now the building is up to itself, abandoned in the country. Isabell’s parents live in Berlin. Her father is restricted after a stroke, but remains the undeniable authority of the house.

Little by little, the younger Anja (Saskia Rosendahl) is crowded into Isabell’s life, a single mother of a wild, needy child. Anja lives in the country, shifts from one precarious job to the next. She tries to somehow get her life on their turn to be there for her daughter.

During a walk, the two women meet each other, somewhere between the villages on a bridge over a river with too little water. They smoke a cigarette, are busy with their topics, remain in thoughts. And yet there is something common.

This is one of these strange moments in “cicadas”, undecided, and yet somehow beautiful and promising. That’s how it is in life. Sometimes you don’t know what to say. Sometimes there is nothing to say.

Ina Weisse is one of these films that you do not do justice to the “Zikaden” by Ina Weisse. Little happens, very much happens. The research Anja finds the elegant, urban Isabell beautiful and attractive, is looking for its closeness. A little natural approach of two different women. And yet there are parallels: Both are deeply involved in their care roles, which they try to fulfill conscientiously. Both seems unclear: What do you want for yourself?

Isabell tries to organize a nurse for her parents, the relationship with her husband Philipp (Vincent Macaigne) is on the brink. He asks the big questions: Is that really what he wants? Is he happy? Isabell seems unable to raise as much empathy for him in the current situation.

According to “The Architect” (2008) and “Das Prelay” (2019), “Zikaden” is the third long feature film by the director and actress Ina Weisse, who is herself daughter of the renowned architect Rolf D. Weisse. She wrote the script and directed the film drama, which celebrated its premiere in the Panorama section in February. It is a slowly told, sometimes melancholic film that plays between Berlin and the green fields and long avenues of Brandenburg-in a summer heat atmosphere that is somehow beautiful and somehow difficult. A tender band between two women relaxes between the big construction sites of life – care, age, breaking love, precarious jobs. A lot remains unspoken, ambivalent. But that is exactly what makes the film so life and touching.

»Zikaden«: Germany, France, 2025. Director and book: Ina Weisse. With: Nina Hoss, Saskia Rosendahl, Vincent Macaigne. 100 min.