Gifted with supernatural abilities and hypersensitive to the accompanying phenomena, Lucia numbs herself with just about anything to find peace, sweeping through the lives of her friends and family like a hurricane. After yet another night of partying she wakes up at a hospital – changed. Now Lucia literally has to face the ghosts of her past to get the family she always wanted.

Director’s Vision for ‘Nomena’

+++ Do I begin where you end? +++

Do we have to accept all the limits that society, life and first and foremost death set for us? How lost must one be in order to want to find oneself again? What is family? And is not the one human flaw, mortality, at the same time the only meaningful element within us, our ultimate drive? What if we could face death without having to lower our gaze? Who would refuse if he or she had the opportunity to resurrect a loved one? But is this morally and ethically justifiable? What is the price we must pay for this? What is the responsibility of someone who has this power? Don’t we all actually have this power, every day, in all our decisions that we make as members of a society?

Above all, Nomena, a female-centered character study with supernatural elements, is about limits and the lack of them, about surpassing them, about trespassing. The title refers to my viewpoint that love and human relationships in general are phenomena, which we get to experience with all our senses and which are mysterious, cruel and fulfilling at the same time. I wanted to literally „bring to light“ the energy between people, above all love, as something supernatural, transcendent, penetrating, limitless. With the help of the unconventional female protagonist Lucia, a traveller between worlds gifted with supernatural abilities, who we meet when she has hit rock bottom, I explore these universal questions, this longing for what is not there (anymore), within the fictional narrative of Nomena.

At the beginning of Nomena I show a woman who reacts hypersensitively to the influences of the beyond, which quite literally beat down on her and who has to numb herself in order to be able to endure it. She pays the price for a gift she never asked for, destroying not only herself but everything around her. Her fall seems predetermined, inevitable. But when the child that Lucia did not know she was carrying is born and shows her a new perspective for the first time, she clutches at this straw, opposes the seemingly immovable obstacles, confronts the facets of interpersonal relationships and thus finds her way home. For me, the focus of Nomena is the exploration of the difficult nuances in dealing with each other, whether as sisters, in intimate relationships or with oneself, and tackles the topic of losing a child and the helpless silence, which often follows an event like this.

+++ A ghost can walk through the walls +++

As a filmmaker, I see it as an opportunity and my responsibility to ask questions within a narrative and thus confront fears and longings in order to make them tangible for an audience in a fictional space that puts the personal, individual-emotional experiences into the foreground, guiding and engaging the audience through the shaped narrative. I aimed at making Nomena more darkly contemplative and immersive than scary, using the genre as a vehicle for telling a story that hits home. Thus I hope to enable the discourse, in the mind of each individual viewer on the one hand, but also as a group after having watched the film, because what one cannot remain silent about must be discussed. The use of genre elements, telling a theme through the lens of a genre film in the guise of a fairytale helps in examining what scares us most, both as individuals and as a society – it can open up the audience and make them receptive in a different way than, for example, a realistic social drama does.

Last but not least, Nomena is a character study that blurs and breaks the line between subjective and external reality, between you and me, between life and death. It is a film that does not shy away from placing an ambivalent female character at its center and thus posing urgent questions about the perception of women in society and how the world deals with them: we show a modern woman, who has to recognize that she can plummet through life shining bright like a comet, but not without burning – both others and herself – and that this is what is deeply human.