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Following her internationally successful short movies and her highly acclaimed documentary Gender X (Berlinale screening), Julia Ostertag now presents her first full-length feature movie Saila. In the tradition of her provocative experimental works and with her infallible sense of impressive soundtracks, Ostertag designs a cinematic parallel universe in which the rules of conventional narrative cinema are suspended.
In search of her lost memory, Saila is moving through a hermetically sealed area the laws of which are revealed to her only by degrees. She encounters a world that is dominated by violence, an end time society, in which everybody recklessly fights for their own survival. She meets outsiders who like her are fugitives and haunted likewise. Every manifestation of nearness results in a catastrophe and leads to the question : " What have I done? " The world outside the area remains invisible. it only exists in the form of distorted radio broadcasts that envision a society even more alarming than the one Saila is situated in : environmental disasters, a nuclear war in India and Pakistan, prevalent homelessness.
	Time and again, Saila is haunted by nightmarish images, by murderous phantasmas, visions, or memories. Every object is a symbol that promises solutions but only causes confusion. Every person she meets is a promise that will be broken. Eventually, she proceeds to the centre of violence that at the same time will be the centre of her memory - where she encounters herself and has to find out that there is another Saila.
In the end, when the so far only accoustically perceivable outer world shadowily intrudes the picture, Saila’s infernal visions undissolvably connect with the real nightmares of the collapsing societies. Ostertag’s film is a challenging artistic realization of individual and collective fears. With breathtaking images that do not tell the hand camera or the imaginable low budget by looking at them, she exposes the audience to an odyssey through an end time scenario that leaves a lasting impact.
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