Victoria

Victoria, a Spanish woman living in Berlin, meets four young men outside a club in the small hours. The time they spend together looks at first like drunken friendship. Then the group's debt to a local gangster surfaces and she finds herself inside a bank robbery. Sebastian Schipper directed. Laia Costa and Frederick Lau star. Its technical fact is that it is one shot: 138 minutes without a cut. It was filmed between 4:30 and 7:00 in the morning on 27 April 2014 in the Kreuzberg and Mitte districts of Berlin. The script ran to twelve pages and most of the dialogue is improvised. Schipper had a fallback: he also shot a conventional, cuttable version over ten days. The single-take version worked on the third attempt, which he said he achieved by motivating the cast through an emotionally intense meeting. It won six German Film Awards including Best Fiction Film and Best Direction. Cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen took a Silver Bear at Berlin. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 82 percent and Metacritic at 77. Who it is for: viewers who like technical nerve and real-time tension. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the first forty minutes long. The film drifts on purpose until the robbery, and that drift is the price of the single take.