Movie, 56 min.
„HOT“ (movie, 56 min., 2023) is an experimental documentary on a vacation in Crete, Greece of five art students. It plays with notions of Coming-Of-Age Movies, Reality TV, Internet Shorts, Homevideo and finds its very own rollercoaster pace within these ideas.
Playing with the format of Reality TV each person of the friend group is interviewed (except for the filmmaker herself) often speaking about their private and intimate thoughts and interactions within the group.
The filmmaker is part of the group, though never interviewed and thus raises questions of what it means to film, what interviewing tells us about the connection between interviewer and interviewee and in general questions if there could ever be an unbiased documentary or even picture.
In an almost voyeuristic matter it can feel like a social experiment at times, though the lines between fiction and reality stay unclear and become especially blurred with the use of intervening footage from of a staged improvisational theatre piece the group did together. The roles and characters merge into each other: Reality becomes fiction and fiction becomes more than real.
In terms of other contents the film follows the group through struggles of identity, queerness, young love, alcohol abuse and their own artistic projects, finding its peak in an absurdist existencial thought about the nonsense that is life.
Shamelessly showing bodies and intimite thoughts the documentary never becomes explicit with the drama that happens, it rather plays with the tension of knowing that something happened but not knowing what and by that puts the group within their own individuality as an example for what it means to be human.
HOT Trailer (2022)
