Augenblicke: A Blink of an Eye
2018 · 4m · Germany
Directed by Kiana Naghshineh
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Three perceptions of one truth - hers, his and ours: a woman walks home at night, is overwhelmed from behind by a stranger who grabs her and tries to rip off her clothes, and they fight; the point of view switches between man and woman, reality and fears blur, and eyewitnesses in surrounding houses watch an escaping perpetrator and a helpless victim - though for the woman herself the situation is not so clear. A Filmakademie Baden-Wurttemberg graduation film.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects this premise to land as a #MeToo sermon, but Naghshineh actually uses the POV shifts to interrogate whose truth matters — the film refuses to *tell* you what happened, which is genuinely unsettling in a way most assault narratives aren't brave enough to be.
A masterclass in formal restraint: the editing between subjective realities, the precise use of sound design to unmoor the viewer from any fixed perspective, and the decision to end in ambiguity rather than catharsis situates this squarely in the tradition of Haneke and Bresson — control deployed as moral inquiry.
That shift to the eyewitness accounts is the kill move — suddenly we're watching a entirely different film through a kitchen window, and the viewer realizes how little the external gaze actually *knows*, all achieved with a single camera position and a cut that reframes everything.
Reviews
Three perceptions of one truth - hers, his and ours. The point of view switches between man and woman. Reality and fears blur into each other.