Moon

Her first feature film is called SUN, the current one is MOON, so it will be interesting to see what Austrian director Kurdwin AYUB will call her third film.

Sarah (Florentina HOLZINGER) from Vienna has to give up her MMA career after losing a fight and becomes self-employed as a personal trainer. Things aren't going so well when she receives an interesting offer from Amman, Jordan. According to her charming Arab interlocutor, she is to work as a personal trainer for his three sisters so that the young ladies don't get too bored. At first everything goes well. Sarah is put in a luxury hotel in Amman with almost no guests and then gradually gets to know her three charges. But gradually it becomes clear that something can't be right in this family. A shocking situation arises in the siblings' luxury residence. Sarah is put to a tough test that challenges her fighting spirit.

As with the first film, director AYUB has once again worked with Ulrich SEIDL's film production company. It certainly has its own theme and style, but shares SEIDL's mercilessly dissecting view of social conditions. Its leading actress, Florentina HOLZINGER, is a real discovery. With her performance SANCTA based on the opera SANCTA SUSANNA by Paul HINDEMITH in 2024, the choreographer has really shaken up several opera houses and caused a stir in the German-language feature pages. The images (camera: Klemens HUFNAGL) from Jordan are also illuminating and magnificent. You have certainly never seen a major city in the Arab world like this on the big screen. The film itself is structured like a classic thriller in places, but cleverly subverts the audience's expectations of such films.

You can already look forward to Kurdwin AYUB's next film, which will definitely be called STERNE.

The story starts in Vienna but soon shifts to Jordania. An Austrian martial arts fighter who had ended her active career and started working as a trainer is in dire straits and welcomes an offer to train three sisters in Jordania. She is hired by the obviously wealthy brother of the girls and Sarah does not much question the motives for this generous offer.

Though this film is an Austrian production we hear far more English and Arabic than German. It is a clever look at what we expect of an Arab country and the film plays with our expectations and fears, he gives us some but not all.

Sarah is booked into a lavish hotel and we already understand that whoever pays for it must be an important man. When she meets the girls in a villa far from the city it is not clear if the girls really wnat to be trained or not. They obviously lived in a golden cage, with bodyguards watching over them and apparently also piunish them if they don't stick to the many rules. Soon Sarah will be drawn into a sectret that brings her in trouble.

The film does not play out as we expect but rather asks us what would we do in Sarahs situation? In Vienna, we saw Sarah training young girls to fight in a ring just for kicks, here she trains three girls who definitely need help. How will she react?

This film was screened in competition at the Warsaw Film festival and despite working with the cliche of a washed up boxer and middle eastern Families who hide their wayward daughters in the attic, MOON still manages to compel your attention for the first 70 minutes of the film.

Sarah, the young woman who finds herself unemployed after losing her last martial art fight, is played with an authenticity that is riveting and you just can not take your eyes off her every unpredictable move.

Florintina Holinger plays Sarah with a nose that looks broken from certain angles and her physical energy masks her psychological trauma from her unhappy life. When she meets four broken Jordan princesses, Sarah struggles to connect and do her job which is to teach them self defense.

If only the filmmaker Kurdein Ayub had trusted her ability to create interesting female characters, we might have had a truly unusual film. If the girls had all made different decisions, we could have watched a slow burn. Instead, we have a frenetic last 15 minutes of the film which betrays the slow suspenseful character development of the first three acts.

Sometimes it is ok to have a slow resolution to the story and I think if she can, Ayub should think about recutting the film with a different outcome.

As it is, the story suddenly ends and we feel like act 4 is just there to resolve the plot, not really to add to the reality of the women Involved.

In this case our main character does work an extra job, but just because her main job ... well she can't really pursue that anymore. So no pun intended. But one has to do something - earn money. Something her sister is telling her ... in a quite uncomfortable scene ... which made me believe she was living under her roof.

The movie feels quite real - which means there is not some flashy stuff happening. And whatever is occurring ... well it could be something that can happen (in one way or another it very likely has) ... which makes it all even more eerie than it might be just thinking about it.

This is about female empowerment, but also about the still way too strong patriarchy that exists ... and most of the world being oblivious about it ... but how to enact things in other countries ... that sometimes do not even work in your own country (in maybe a lesser degree but still?) ... so the movie is quite heavy ... and it does have a "Barbie" scene too ... which feels so degrading ... on so many levels ... there are quite a few scenes that may need a trigger warning ... let's just say the movie is not an easy watch for sure ...