EXCLUSIVE: Deadline can reveal a teaser for German director Timm Kröger’s black-and-white drama The Theory Of Everything, set against the backdrop of a 1960s physics congress in the Swiss Alps, ahead of its world premiere in Competition in Venice on Saturday.
German actor Jan Bülow plays a physic Ph.D student who travels to the conference with his doctoral advisor (Hanns Zischler) to listen to an Iranian scientist talk about a ground-breaking theory of quantum mechanics.
The meeting takes a strange turn-of-events when the guest speaker fails to materialize, and a German physicist attending the meeting is found dead.
The film marks the directorial feature debut of Kröger, who is also a cinematographer with credits including The Council Of Birds.
“This film began – it has become a cliché to say – as a dream; a strange yet uncannily familiar mountainscape, a physicist’s congress that, of course, never seems to take place, and a love story engulfed by an amorphous «conspiracy» that remains opaque to the end,” he says in a director’s statement.
“This film is supposed to feel like a dream; one that is allowed to be as strange as it is entertaining, and which also repeatedly recurs to a cinema of yesteryear – or rather: to an amalgamated memory-image of cinema, sort of as if Hitchcock and Lynch (and countless others, known or forgotten) made love on the carpet of an old hotel lobby.”
The German-Austrian-Swiss co-production is produced by Heino Deckert and Tina Börner at MA.JA.DE and Viktoria Stolpe and Kröger, under the banner of their company The Barricades.
Co-producers are Austria’s Panama Film and Switzerland’s Catpics.
Charades is handling international sales and Anonymous Content is overseeing North America.
