sebastian selig, Deadline

But the very best is yet to come: Once again, a film by Ludwig Wüst completely blows us away. Wüst is an obsessive. Coming from an acting background, at some point he had to channel this irrepressible flow of ideas within him into very idiosyncratic cinematic paths. Film after film, he thought it through down to the last detail and then simply let it loose. I AM HERE!, his latest feature film, which is celebrating its world premiere in Rotterdam, begins completely unpredictably somewhere deep in the forest. We follow a woman and a man deeper and deeper in between the trunks flooded with sunshine. In long, sometimes 15-minute scenes without editing, the most incomprehensible stories gradually peel out into the open in conversations that seem completely natural. Martina Spitzer and Markus Schramm impress with undoubtedly one of the very best acting performances of recent years.
Unfortunately, it is far too rare to hear dialogues in German-language films that are not slightly theatrically exaggerated. This is different here in I AM HERE! Again and again there are pauses where you can literally watch the characters thinking and feeling, and when the completely natural flow of conversation starts again, it has often taken a completely surprising new turn. In one of the film's most beautiful moments, we find ourselves at one point standing in a wide field. In a hole at our feet, the past is burning. The flames carefully turn page after page before they burn up before our eyes. Later, Wüst explains that he carefully prepared the photos and old ZACK comic pages with solvents and small paper balls between the pages to create this cinematically impressive effect. I AM HERE! is full of such seemingly unpredictable wonders. A cinema film that succeeds again and again in the almost impossible.
link IFFR Rotterdam