Jesus, Aliens! I think

A film project done at the kitchen table, from the level of the vacuum cleaner. Sophie Bösker rearranges her familial setting. As a grown daughter, she returns home during the Covid19 crisis. The possibilities are limited. Public space is in lockdown. Encounters with unknown people are rare to nonexistent. What else is left to do but encounter one’s own family in their friendly alienness. So, a sci-fi film in quarantine. With a recording instrument that offers only partial protection from the family confusion; a camera. Does the microphone work? Ok, the director sighs. “Now I’m calming down again.” And goes on, “I have to make a film about what I have. Mom, Dad, and me.” The apparatuses work. But the material, the protagonists, to begin with, they rebel in their routine domesticity. They’re complaining. Maybe the aliens have attached to the family’s electromagnetic rays and are exerting more and more control. The mother makes sure of the connections; the father, the gaze in the camera; and the brother, the tension. They step out of their roles and then back into them again. Moods under observation. The situation throws everyone back upon him or herself. Yeast dough and vacuum cleaner and lawn mower and jogging pants and there it is again, the issue of wages for housework. Sophie Bösker has achieved a concise piece on family dynamics, on the backstage and frontstage of a household and at the same time, on the role of the involved invader. The subliminal sense and silent gnawing. Pandemic insourcing, lockdown number one, 2020. (Madeleine Bernstorff)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt