Susanna Nicchiarelli’s road movie and biopic Nico, 1988 takes us from Paris via Prague, Nuremberg, Manchester, the Polish provinces and Roman coast to chronicle the last years in the life of Christa Päffgen. Under her stage name »Nico«, the one-time Velvet Underground singer and muse to Andy Warhol was a star, but in this film, Trine Dyrholm portrays her in her later, second life as a complex, rough and uncompromising solo artist and mother of an almost forgotten son.

»What I find surprising is how little everybody knows of Nico’s life in the seventies and eighties. And, most of all, how little she cared. Maybe that’s why I fell in love with the way Nico had become in the eighties: this 40-year-old woman I saw in the interviews, so ironic and strong, didn’t care at all about the superstar she once had been, about the legendary beauty she had stopped being. So far from the cliché of the fallen star, or the fragile forty-something missing her youth. I loved that she was so different from the cliché. (…) I focused on her last tour because I believe that one of the problems of biopics is wanting to tell the whole story from the beginning to the end. The whole story is often boring and predictable. I like films that tell a part of the story, and through the part they can tell the whole. So the last two years of Nico’s life were for me revealing enough to give the complete picture of what kind of person she was and she had been.« Susanna Nicchiarelli

Awards for ›Nico, 1988‹
Grand Prize of the Jury – Les Arcs European Film Festival 2017 | Venice Horizons Award – Venice Film Festival 2017