Fanny, a 17-year-old schoolgirl from France, goes on a language exchange trip to Germany. In Leipzig, she meets her pen pal Lena who is the same age as her and who is eager to become involved in political activism. Fanny’s host is practically hostile when this uninvited foreigner first shows up, but that’s before a disarmingly candid (and frequently dishonest) Fanny starts to share stories invented to earn sympathy. When activist-minded Lena comes to visit her in France, the two girls are practically inseparable, encouraging one another’s rebellion in increasingly dangerous ways. What begins as a teenage crush snowballs into an alarming flirtation with the black bloc protest movement.
“These two characters represent two facets of myself. When I went abroad, I wanted to be someone else, to reinvent myself in a different place, in a different language, and it worked. Such escapism was the catalyst for a story I began writing during the Covid pandemic, a time of local and national lockdowns in France when young people were not handling it well /…/. I wanted to write about how this generation was affected.” (Claire Burger)