Border

A young woman works at the customs in a small border town. More selective than her colleagues, she uses her unerring intuition to stop smugglers, as she can literally smell an undeclared bottle of alcohol or kilos of hard drugs in a suitcase. She is a sought-after expert, but she is not interested in a career; the border of her small town is the border of her world altogether. One day, someone passes by and throws off her previously unfailing sense of smell. Troubled and intrigued by her own imperfection, she makes contact.

Inspired by Ali Abbasi’s film Gräns (2018), director Christopher Rüping brings an old-time fairy tale to the Halle in the Schiffbau. What if there were senses beyond our human ones, beyond the visible world accessible to us, other talents and other needs? A hypersensitive sense of smell, a razor-sharp intuition and the thoroughly rationalized world of our capitalist everyday life collapses. Beneath the washable surfaces of public space, behind the objectivity of the bureaucratic world, smells, desires, and sensibilities rule, the primal violence of which can throw us proudly civilized people off track.