How to Save a Dead Friend

Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, 2022, 103'

When at 16 years of age Marusya meets Kimi, she is convinced that her life has already come to a halt: the existential anxiety and self-destructive impulses, marked on her arms, find a dark mirror in the boy by whose side she will remain until the last moment. Neither love nor music, alcohol, or drugs will save the two, and not even cinema, which in the hands of the film director becomes an instrument of survival and testimony, at first as a game, afterwards as a necessity.

Made with footage filmed over twelve years, edited at a breathless pace, the film is a dizzying plunge into an abyss from which getting out unharmed is not easy: many of the companions of the director-heroine will not make it - some commit suicide, some OD, some die in an accident. This serves as a testimony to the torment of a generation that experienced loss in an age of radical transformation and impossible readjustment. How to save a dead friend, a shocking directorial debut, is one of the most intimately personal films of the year, but also one of the most lucid and saddest in depicting the atmosphere of an entire country through the malaise, conflicts, and tensions of lost youth.