A film about a time when conquering the world seems entirely possible. Five adolescents growing up somewhere in provincial Germany, in a place where having a car and a driver’s licence means freedom. Five adolescents who need to decide whether to stay or go once their final winter together is over and they leave school. Katja, Sascha, Benni, Laila and Schöller run in a pack yet constantly collide, warily circling each other in a relationship beset at once by distance, violence, love and loneliness. For them, closeness and pain are one and the same. In search of stability and themselves they make their own rules, yet after the winter ends and they leave school, their paths will diverge. A farewell, but also a new start that will allow them to leave everything behind for something new and unfathomable.

Naked Animals explores the metaphorical space that is the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Melanie Waelde has chosen a suitably raw and powerful language to describe her characters’ exposed and vulnerable state.

»Naked Animals is a film that functions like an emotion, a memory, a vision of the future. A film that hits where it hurts. Where the heart beats. Where we know we’re vulnerable while trying not to be. A film that inevitably causes pain no matter how well we’re doing.«
Melanie Waelde

Awards for Naked Animals
EWIP ZOOM Medienfabrik Award – European Work in Progress 2019