Sweat (2014)

SWEAT follows the last three days of a friendship between two girls. Marion and Elisa live in a quiet village in the countryside that offers them very little. They roam their rural surroundings, go to parties, watch videos, swim in the lake and fight. Angry about the accustomed, they develop new, unexpected power. And start to act it out. "With a pulsating sound comes an Austrian still life stripped bare: summer holidays, backwoods, boredom. Two girlfriends ponder the future and shoot the breeze. Frustrated by the eternal monotony, they channel their adolescent insecurities into spontaneous outbursts of aggression. Playing to that on a YouTube stream are filmed atrocities of live animal feeding: In both cases, the law of the jungle reigns. In the beautifully photographed vacuum of a clearly staked out village cosmos, Iris Blauensteiner confronts her protagonists with the unavoidable settings of the course on the way to adulthood-and also with the two young women's long-term separation, the inevitability of which has first become apparent. A coming-of-age portrait between wannabe and gangster attitudes, disco and a cautious quest for identity."