Ingeborg Bachmann - Someone who was once me

In a poetic search for traces, director Regina Schilling lets the audience witness the creation of art: Sandra Hüller approaches the life of Ingeborg Bachmann across an imagined single day, lending her words a haunting physical presence. Through an artful interweaving of improvised scenes, archival treasures, interviews, and Bachmann's own texts, the film traces the author's central phases of life – from her wartime childhood in Carinthia, through her rise to become a star of Gruppe 47, to her final days in Rome. The path is marked by complicated relationships with Paul Celan, Hans Werner Henze, and Max Frisch, and by an unyielding struggle for a language of her own, radical and uncompromising, caught between public fame and existential crises. 

For Ingeborg Bachmann's 100th birthday, director Regina Schilling achieves an approach to one of the 20th century's most significant writers that is at once sensual and intellectual. Through Sandra Hüller's powerful interpretation and masterful archival montage, Bachmann's visionary linguistic force becomes immediately tangible on screen. INGEBORG BACHMANN – SOMEONE I ONCE WAS is a cinematic portrait celebrating the fragility and strength of an artist who eluded every attempt to claim or categorize her, and whose work retains an unbroken visionary power to this day.