Mixed Messages

Mixed Messages

Kanchi Wichmann

DE
2017
Web series
67’
desired! – film lust & queer

Kanchi Wichmann’s lesbian web series Mixed Messages centres around 36-year-old dyke Ren, newly arrived in Berlin from London and now navigating her way through the terrain of Berlin’s alternative queer scene. Between speed-dating and meditation courses, bondage and hammock, the neighbourhood playground and the old-architecture style shared at-plus-kitchen, she tries to make sense of the messages and ambiguities that lesbian Berliners seem to specialize in when communicating – in other words, mixed messages. Pointed and self-ironic, the series captures recurring patterns and curious rituals that need to be figured out on this scene, in this city, in this generation.

»You see one person go through the same experience over and over again, and if it was a feature film audiences would expect there to be some sort of narrative arc where the main character learns and achieves something. But that isn’t what happens here. Ren almost always finds herself back to square one, because that’s the experience me and my friends often felt we had. So I think that fits an episodic, almost sitcom format, as it was the nature of the material. I never considered making a web series before as I consider myself to be a film-maker and wanted to make a second feature. But I felt this format suited the circular nature of the material so much more.«
– Kanchi Wichmann on www.exberliner.com

Director / Script

Kanchi Wichmann

Cinematography

Smina Blut

Editing

Cary Cronenwett

Cast

Alana Lake, Cleo Jacobe, Liz Rosenfeld, Elly Clarke, Anja Kümmel, Sadie Lune, Sergina Xuparina, Ann Antidote, Skyler Braeden Fox

Production

Nadja Krüger

Contact

Pro-Fun Media

Kanchi Wichmann

Kanchi Wichmann was born in 1974 in North Devon to an English mother and a German father. She began making films using video and Super 8 and made her first 16 mm narrative film at the age of 21. Her short film Travelling Light was nominated for a BAFTA. Her first feature film Break My Fall about a lesbian relationship in East London was released in 2011 and was listed as one of 10 great lesbian films on a list compiled by the British Film Institute in 2016. Wichmann has worked in many film-related jobs including film festivals, cinemas, and for other directors, most notably in the production office of the German director Ulrike Ottinger. As of 2014, Wichmann lives and works in Berlin, and is currently in pre-production on her second feature film.


Films by Kanchi Wichmann
Break My Fall 2011 | I Don’t Exist 2004 | Travelling Light 1999