The film, which investigates a murky aspect of online culture in an increasingly lonely world, is having its world premiere as part of the narrative feature competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival Right before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, Slovenian director Urša Menart came across a curious phenomenon on the internet: young people, mostly women, making up tragic life stories to gather the increasingly sparse attention span of their followers. Even more curiously, the director realized people would often drop everything to visit these micro-influencers. The muddled parasocial relationship between poster and follower would come to inspire “Everything That’s Wrong With You,” having its world premiere as part of the narrative feature competition section at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival.
The dramedy first finds young Maruša (Anuša Kodelja) back in her home country of Slovenia after a season living in Berlin. She just lost her mother to cancer, and the grief only amplifies her sense of displacement. While aimlessly scrolling one day, Maruša comes across Alja (Klara Kuk), a nurse living in a small coastal town in Germany.
She sends a first message, which quickly spirals into a fast-developing friendship that is put to the test once they finally meet in person. It got me thinking about the human need to connect.” The two main characters were born out of the director’s observations and “interesting people” she met and read about. In the almost seven years it took to get the project off the ground, Menart worked on other films such as “My Last Year as a Loser,” but continued to think about the story and work on research.
I always worried: will this theme even interest me six years from now? Because making a film is a marathon.” Little could Menart know that the themes of her film would only become more relevant in the years since, especially as the rapid advancement of technologies such as artificial intelligence amplified conversations around loneliness and the need for human connection. We have it harder, but our lives are very rich and unexamined still.
We’ve had wonderful films and novels in the past decades dealing with the interior lives of women, but I still feel like there is still so much that is left unexplored and so many interesting characters that still haven’t been able to speak to the audience. So someone else can make a film about the male loneliness epidemic, I’m all for it, but it’s not going to be me [laughs].” Menart always knew her film would hinge on the casting of the two main actors. This, the director says, made her realize that “they each brought in an aspect of their personality that maybe would be missing in the script for the character.” After casting was completed, Menart spent a year working with the actors on developing their characters and adjusting the script accordingly.
Another key aspect of the production was finding the perfect location for Alja’s home, which ended up being the small German seaside town of Heringsdorf. I wanted to have this feeling that when she arrives at this other location, everything opens a bit.” “It was a bit of a challenge because it is a tourist town that doesn’t have the infrastructure to support the making of a feature,” she adds. But it actually suited me very well.
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