03/07/2017 - The young Thomas Stuber gets together once again with screenwriter Clemens Meyer for a love story set in a supermarket, starring Sandra Hüller and Franz Rogowski

Sandra Hüller and Franz Rogowski during the shoot for In the Aisles

After the success of his first feature film A Heavy Heart [+see also:
trailer
interview: Thomas Stuber
film profile], which won the silver Lola for Best German Film in 2016, Thomas Stuber teams up for the third time with screenwriter Clemens Meyer (who he worked with on the short film Of Dogs and Horses, winner at the Student Academy Awards in 2012; also the author of Andreas Dresen’s As We Were Dreaming [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: Andreas Dresen
film profile]). Their new screenplay, called In the Aisles [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Franz Rogowski
interview: Thomas Stuber
film profile], in fact, won the 2015 German Screenplay Award. The film is currently in post-production, after a filming schedule of 30 days (since 28 February this year) and has been shot in Leipzig, Wittenberg, Bitterfeld and Karlsruhe, and often at night.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

And with good reason: The main location for the love story narrated in the film is a supermarket, but as producer Jochen Laube of Sommerhaus Filmproduktion highlighted, it is not easy to find a supermarket where one can film for a number of days at a stretch without disturbing its normal functioning. Therefore, they had to find a workaround in order to adapt the intrigue first thought up by Meyer in a novel for the big screen: A romance that unfolds in the supermarket where they work between Marion, employed in the jams aisle, and Christian, the taciturn newbie in the drinks aisle, who acts like a father to his colleague Bruno, as he guides him in the art of moving palettes.

Studer explains that Meyer’s story did not simply fascinate him as a “story about simple people looking for a bit of happiness,” but he was also captivated by the atmosphere of the context in which it plays out – This “very peculiar universe” that is a supermarket, inhabited by people who are often “solitary on the outside” but are part of “a community on the inside.”

For his main characters, Stuber has paired stellar actors, starting with Sandra Hüller, star of Maren Ade’s internationally acclaimed film Toni Erdmann [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: Maren Ade
film profile], for which she won the EFA for best European actress in 2016. The role of the shy handler in love is played by Franz Rogowski, a true rising star (who gained fame with the breath-taking Victoria [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sebastian Schipper
film profile] at Berlin and who was recently discovered at Cannes in Michael Haneke’s Happy End [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: Michael Haneke
film profile]). The friend Bruno is brought to life by Peter Kurth, lead actor of A Heavy Heart.

Sommerhaus Filmproduktion has co-produced In the Aisles with Rotor Film (Austria) and Departures Film, with the support of the regional funds MDM, MFG Baden-Württemberg and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, as well as the Ministry for Culture.

In collaboration with