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THE LIFT

AUFZUG

BIG FOOD THE MOVIE LTD - as PROD

Social issues - Completed 2012

The story is set sometime between the American moonwalk and Coca Cola's serious ambition to turn the moon into an advertising logo. The Lift is a place of relative safety, but floor by floor, with each passenger in his or her tableau, the atmosphere of mayhem seeps in. Inspired by the Arab Spring

Festivals
& Awards

Cambridge 2012
International Short FIlm
WRIFF 2012
Best International Short Film
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    • Year of production
    • 2012
    • Genres
    • Social issues, Drama
    • Countries
    • GERMANY
    • Languages
    • GERMAN
    • Duration
    • 18 mn
    • Writer(s)
    • William MACKINNON
    • Synopsis
    • Set in a large newspaper office, the story entails a number of individuals going to and fro in a moment of violent unrest.
      The young hero (or anti hero) is a lift operator. The lift/elevator becomes a theatre of love, death, trouble and ambition.
      Opening on two journalists: one drinks and is full of questions, the other is more silent.
      A newspaper proprietor, arrogant and opinionated, surrounded by a group of fawning young sycophants. Despite his apparent authority he will end under arrest by what we may assume is a state of police emergency.
      A young woman grieves the damage to the heel of her stiletto shoe, clearly the result and emotional trauma of the outside riots.
      The sudden appearance of a character armed and dressed in riot gear suggests the immanent presence of state authority.
      Regardless of the outside chaos the French fashion correspondent single-mindedly continues with her sartorial advice into a dictaphone. When her lover enters, feeling safe in a power cut, they carry on romantically.
      Despite the liftboy's seeming complacency each of the individual characters pursue their own passionate agendas.
      Next the lift boy is left alone with a corpse by journalist colleagues who are sensitive and upset but still fail to consider that they have left a dead body in the immediate company of a child.
      Here, when we hear the lift bell ring we wonder if he will respond, move the lever drive down. He does. During the drive another power cut comes. We are left in a potential nightmare; a young boy in the dark of a closed space with a cadaver at his feet. The boy stays untouched, only coldly curious. He lights a match to scrutinize the face.
      A much older man makes an appearance to declare a strike in the basement of the print workers, thereby revisiting memories of his socialist youth.
      Towards the end, a common police man addresses the boy like an absurd father, and wants him to stand up like a man. Just as the old striker seems to have nostalgia for a socialist past, so the police officer seems to reflect a sentiment for the foregone spirit of European fascism.
      Finally the boy leaves his closed environment, which works nearly as an ivory tower.
      Our anti-hero steps through the outside wreckage into an unknown night and an unknown destiny. He somehow doesn't seem to care about the moon, or the advertisement on it, the upheavals, the futile protests, the global arrogance. He even claims he has seen it before.
      The young lift boy walks away from the situation, far-gone in hopelessness and disinterest.
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