A Portrait of director Anna Roller

The second film is the hardest. If you believe the myths persistently doing the rounds in the film industry, the next project after a debut often involves so many expectations and difficulties that it can potentially drive young filmmakers mad, if not immediately derail hopeful careers, as some may suggest in warning.

Anna Roller, as she freely admits in our interview, was also “afraid of this infamous second film”. But from the outside, there was little reason to be. Her first feature-length film DEAD GIRLS DANCING, made at the end of her studies at the HFF in Munich, celebrated its world premiere at Munich Film Festival and Tribeca Festival in 2023. Later, the story about four girls in an aban­doned village won the New Faces Award and was nominated for the German Camera Award, among others; MUBI released the film in German cinemas and it will soon be shown on ARD as part of the Debüt im Ersten series.

“I soon realised that the gaps between films become very long if you only write your own material,” the Munich native explains. “So, while I was writing, I started reading scripts as well, and looking for something I could make my own. I just wanted to throw myself into the next film as quickly as possible. My idea was to escape the pressure by simply continuing to work the same way as I did at film school: approaching each project believing that the next one will follow anyway, and that you’re allowed to try things out and make mistakes.”

In the end, the second film was completed much faster than expected. Roller was behind the camera for the film adaptation of the bestseller ALLEGRO PASTELL as early as summer 2024; at the time of our interview, she was in the middle of editing. The adaptation of Leif Randt’s novel is the baby of producer Tobias Walker, who had been impressed by Roller’s short film DIE LETZTEN KINDER IM PARADIES when sitting on a festival jury a few years earlier. “We stayed in contact, and when he came to the premiere of DEAD GIRLS DANCING, he was looking for a suitable director,” she recalls. “It‘s actually rather funny that he thought I might be right for the job because ALLEGRO PASTELL is quite different from my debut.”

The difference lay not least in the scale of this “fragmentary idea of a love story”, as Roller describes ALLEGRO PASTELL. The story is told over a long period of time and in a wide variety of locations (in addition to Berlin and Frankfurt, the film was also shot in Lisbon), and the number of motifs surpassed those of its predecessor many times over. “I needed a different mindset to tackle this material. But once you are on set, the difference isn’t so big. The work process felt pretty similar, and that was also because I was working with most of the same people as on the first film, from the cameraman to make-up and set design,” she reports. “Overall, I just had even more people to help me. A second assistant director! I was really excited about that.”

Roller is a great believer in teamwork in filmmaking, anyway. She admits that she no longer believes in the auteur genius kicking their underlings during the working process: “That’s no longer in keeping with the times and I don’t want to work like that, either. I would only be restricting myself if I claimed to know everything; it robs a project of so many ideas and other people’s talents. I love it when the others bring their skills and ideas to the table, when you influence each other’s work and grow a film together. And that is also because, as the captain of such a ship, I have the chance to allow myself vulnerability without everything being thrown off course.”

It is quite possible that Roller came to this realisation long before her second or even first feature film. In fact, the 31-year-old has been behind the camera for much longer than her HFF studies. Inspired by the making-ofs for THE LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER, she gathered relatives and friends around her as a teenager in order to shoot her own fantasy epics during the summer holidays and even for months afterwards. Often, she had the backing of her parents, who planned their holidays to go wherever she could find suitable filming locations. So, Roller has not only demonstrated that too much reverence for the second film is exaggerated, but also that it is not as far from Tolkien’s fantasy worlds to the German film industry as people might assume.

Patrick Heidmann