"Cicadas" in the cinema | Approaching in avenues

Summer in Brandenburg: Isabell (Nina Hoss) is trying to bring order to her parents' weekend house. She's tidying up this light-filled, spacious bungalow, designed by her father, a renowned architect. Now the building is left to its own devices, abandoned in the countryside. Isabell's parents live in Berlin. Her father is limited after a stroke, but remains the undisputed authority of the house.

Little by little, the younger Anja (Saskia Rosendahl), a single mother of a wild, love-hungry child, forces her way into Isabell's life. Anja lives in the countryside, limping from one precarious job to the next. She tries to somehow get her life in order to be there for her daughter.

The two women meet on a walk somewhere between the villages, on a bridge over a river with too little water. They smoke cigarettes, preoccupied with their own issues, lost in thought. And yet, they share something in common.

This is one of those strange moments in "Cicadas," indecisive, yet somehow beautiful and promising. That's life. Sometimes you don't know what to say. Sometimes there's simply nothing to say.

Ina Weisse's "Cicadas" is one of those films that can't be adequately described. On the surface, little happens, but in the background, a great deal happens. The bold Anja finds the elegant, urbane Isabell beautiful and attractive and seeks her company. It's a rather unusual encounter between two very different women. And yet there are parallels: Both are deeply entangled in their caregiving roles, which they conscientiously try to fulfill. For both, it seems unclear: What do they want for themselves?

Isabell is trying to find a caregiver for her parents, while her relationship with her husband Philipp (Vincent Macaigne) is on the rocks. He's asking the big questions: Is this really what he wants? Is he happy? Isabell seems unable to muster as much empathy for him as he would like in the current situation.

After "The Architect" (2008) and "The Prelude" (2019), "Cicadas" is the third feature film by director and actress Ina Weisse, herself the daughter of the renowned architect Rolf D. Weisse. She wrote the screenplay and directed the drama, which premiered in February in the Panorama section of the Berlinale. It is a slowly narrated, at times melancholic film set between Berlin and the green fields and long avenues of Brandenburg – in a summer heat atmosphere that is somehow beautiful and somehow heavy. Between the major construction sites of life – care, old age, broken love, precarious jobs – a tender bond develops between two women. Much remains unsaid, ambivalent. But that is precisely what makes the film so true to life and touching.

"Cicadas": Germany, France, 2025. Directed and written by Ina Weisse. Starring: Nina Hoss, Saskia Rosendahl, and Vincent Macaigne. 100 minutes. Release: June 19.