Keeping Balance (Gleichgewicht)
2015 · 5m · Austria
Directed by Bernhard Wenger
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Denise, 20, rides the Tagada carousel at Vienna's Prater amusement park nearly every day to cope with a violent past.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A girl rides a carnival ride every day to survive trauma—sounds like therapy-doc-lite, and it mostly is, but Wenger somehow resists the urge to make it about redemption, and that refusal is quietly radical.
The formal restraint here is exquisite: five minutes of cyclical motion and repetition that echoes the structural traditions of structural cinema, yet the emotional register remains intimate and unadorned—a delicate balance of form and vulnerability.
The decision to film almost entirely on the carousel itself—shooting Denise's face in motion rather than in static interview—transforms what could've been a heavy psychology into something almost lyrical, where the centrifugal force becomes the film's emotional method.
Reviews
She was doing these movements and jumps and I was stunned. After a while, I went up to her and asked how it's possible for her to keep her balance while standing and jumping on the ride because all the other people were sitting.