Human Factors

Germany

Jan travels with his wife and children to the seaside house on the Belgian coast. Upon arrival, Nina sees people fleeing from the house; the incident jeopardizes the relaxed atmosphere of the weekend.

The couple co-own an advertising agency, and unbeknownst to Nina, Jan considers taking on an election campaign.

He discovers the eldest daughter's school absences but does not reveal them to his wife, while their son Max has an obsessive attachment to the little rodent Zorro.

“I wanted to depict the general malaise present in our contemporary society, starting from the microcosm of the family. The film is built on the multiple perspectives of the characters – explains Ronny Trocker – each perceives the events from their own point of view. A formal aspect that can not only help to delve deeper into family conflicts but also offer the audience different access points to the story and the characters themselves.”

Ronny Trocker, already the director of the surprising The Eremites, presented at the Venice Film Festival 73, in the Horizons section, reaffirms his talent in directing Human Factors, always on family-related themes, with a nod to Haneke's Happy End but especially to Ruben Ostlund's Force Majeure, to which he strongly alludes.

Perspective playbacks accompany the film in three different locations, always through the different points of view of the event and the "human factor" that intervenes in the event itself. The "force majeure" here is also the reaction or absence, the happening and the presumed event, the sensation or the actual action: the perception of the event is always important.

Trust, or rather distrust, is the central concept of the film; no one is affected by this "familial" sentiment.

Each is enclosed in their own adult, childish, or adolescent world where distrust is the first obstacle to communication.

A perfectly reconstructed puzzle of mutual distrusts in an apparently unsuspecting context like that of the family "human factor"...