23/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: German director Eva Trobisch follows up her Locarno-winning debut with a confident feature about a nurse in palliative care

Ivo [+see also:
interview: Eva Trobisch, Adrian Campean
film profile] is the name of Eva Trobisch’s second full-length effort, after All Good [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] won the Best First Feature Award at Locarno in 2018, which is playing in the Berlinale’s competitive Encounters sidebar. The main and title character, Ivo – Minna Wündrich in her first lead film role – works in palliative care: not as a nurse at a single hospice, but rather as a home-carer. As a member of the so-called SAPV (Specialised Outpatient Palliative Care) network providing a suitable alternative for people who prefer the comfort of their own home, she travels door to door and tends to dying patients alongside their family members.

Zipping between other people’s houses on call makes Ivo both self-governed and also safely removed from the obligation to nurture a home environment herself, at least not in the most conventional way. Her old Skoda is more of a home for her than the flat looked after by her very independent teenage daughter, and somehow, this poses no contradictions. To Ivo, most work days are smooth sailing when it comes to activities and tasks, but it’s the essence of the job itself that poses the real challenge here.

In order to shape her protagonist in line with the fact that she works with death (although she is not conditioned by it), Trobisch conducted in-depth research, both theoretical and practical, with the help of Johann Campean (who also appears as Ivo’s boss, Johann) and the SAPV network he founded in the Ruhr region, where the film takes place. In addition to involving him as an expert, consultant and actor, the director opted for a generous, but still uncompromising, kind of realism in depicting people in their relationship with death.

Wündrich is the heart of the film, imbuing this rather enigmatic character with an aura of openness by gradually peeling off layer after layer of Ivo’s defences. That disposition is also marvellously captured by cinematographer Adrian Campean in a mix of subjective tracking shots and static takes where Ivo is almost always present as an integral part of a backdrop. Sometimes, it’s a close-up of a hand touching a naked body; other times, she’s a sidelined figure in the geometry of an interior shot, but it's always open to interpretation, and the relatively sparse dialogue and music are helpful in framing that very openness.

Sometimes, matters of one’s life and death are more complicated for others than for oneself. Such is the case with Solveigh (a very dedicated Pia Hierzegger), who’s both a patient and a friend. Her wish to seek solace in assisted dying is as reasonable as any, but asking Ivo to help without the knowledge of Sol’s husband Franz (Lukas Turtur) introduces another moral dilemma: what do we owe to each other? Who can we owe our lives and deaths to? To make matters even more complex, Ivo and Franz have been having an affair for a while now: a relationship that can constitute salvation, trouble, or both. With such an assured, standout feature as this, Trobisch can certainly afford to dwell on these ambiguities. That said, the film fully blossoms when it acknowledges such contradictions as irreconcilable; always in a calm, accepting manner, as yet another little curiosity life throws your way.

Ivo is a German production by Berlin’s Studio Zentral and Cologne-based Network Movie Film- und Fernsehproduktion. Loco Films is responsible for its world sales.