I’ll Be Gone in June

For many, the United States of America was and is a great promise. So it is for 16-year-old Franny. An exchange student from Brandenburg, she lands in New Mexico in 2001, far from the glittering cities of her dreams. The barren roads lose themselves in the dusty desert landscape. Franny looks at this strange world through the viewfinder of her small camera and falls in love with the taciturn Elliott. Then come the attacks of 9/11. Suddenly American confidence turns into suspicion, patriotism becomes a duty, and even the teenagers’ carefree days carry a heavy shadow.

In her feature debut, director Katharina Rivilis draws on her own experiences as an exchange student in New Mexico and tells of coming of age as a double loss of innocence. She looks at her characters with a tenderness that never turns nostalgic. Their world still exists without smartphones, but long since no longer without fear. And cinematographer Giulia Schelhas finds images of painful beauty for it: sunburnt hills and faces caught between defiance and longing. That Wim Wenders in particular co-produced the film is no coincidence: in his cinema, too, a deep sense of being lost often hid behind America’s boundless expanse. But while Wenders told of the disappointment of American longings, Rivilis shows a country that no longer believes its own promises.