Why ‘Phantoms of July,’ Julian Radlmaier’s Universal Film About Longing, Is Set in an East German Town

An East German waitress with a broken heart and an Iranian YouTuber with a broken arm feel trapped and lonely in their lives, longing for something more. Or maybe for something, or someone, else. You can, cinematically, meet both young women in the East German town of Sangerhausen, the setting of Phantoms of July (Sehnsucht in Sangerhausen, which in English means “Longing in Sangerhausen”), the new film from up-and-coming German auteur Julian Radlmaier (Bloodsuckers – A Marxist Vampire Comedy, Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog).

When it world premieres in the competition program of the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival on Thursday, Aug. 7, audiences can look forward to a constantly surprising audiovisual journey, a tender scavenger hunt through the province full of quirky humor and wondrous detours.

“The winding paths of chance draw the two women together on an unexpected ghost hunt in the mountains,” reads a synopsis, promising “a romantic adventure film about an unlikely friendship and the yearning for another life.”

Radlmaier‘s cast of characters also includes an older Asian German who offers tours of his personal highlights of the region rather than the top sights featured in guidebooks, a woman urging others to guess the name of her dog, nude hikers, possible ghosts or phantoms, and more.

But there are also political undertones and overtones. “Sehnsucht in Sangerhausen is a film about the alchemy of encounter,” Radlmaier says in a director’s note. “Against the backdrop of a societal climate shifting to the right, the film brings together people who are often put against each other in public discourse.”

The cast includes Clara Schwinning, Maral Keshavarz, Henriette Confurius, Paula Schindler, Ghazal Shojaei, Kyung-Taek Lie, Buksori Lie, Marlene Hauser, and Jérémie Galiana. Radlmaier wrote, directed and edited the film, with Faraz Fesharaki handling the cinematography.

The movie’s local release in Germany is scheduled for Nov. 27 by Grandfilm. World sales are being handled by Bendita Film Sales.

Ahead of its world premiere, Radlmaier talked to THR about discovering the East German town that is the setting of Phantoms of July, the inpirations for characters and plot twists, casting a former Locarno winner and a veteran of his films, how his filmmaking has evolved with his latest, and that “Soviet-era river barge punk melodrama” that may be next for him.

Your film is set in a smaller town in Germany, but deals with all sorts of universal themes. How did you come up with the idea for the movie, and why did you pick Sangerhausen as its location?

For the first time in my short career, I really started from a place, a location. With my previous films, I had a story first, or a theme. This time, it was different. I discovered this small town of Sangerhausen, about which I had actually never heard before. I saw a picture with this impressive mountain and spoil heap outside the city. It reminded me of Mount Fuji in Japanese movies, or a volcano, like Mount Vesuvius. So, I went there and discovered the city, and was fascinated by all the different things I encountered there.

On one hand, it seemed to be a very dense representation of both Germany’s past and present because there are many, many historical layers – from romanticism to those strange Middle Ages stone faces in walls that we show in the movie, and the world’s biggest rose collection. So there are very weird details, and a lot of those also ended up in the film. I said: Wow, there are so many story world elements there already. And then it also used to be one of the cities with the highest unemployment in Germany after the industry collapsed there. So, it’s very beautiful, but also has a depressive side.

I also noticed that there were some people with a migration background. Some people from Northern Macedonia are working there, and we met some Arab people in the shops. And I wondered: How is it for these people to live in that town? So, just by observing a bit of the characters in this town, I came up with different storylines.

I looked up the region and saw it was in the former East Germany, or GDR. In the film, we even see a monument that has a slogan like “Proletarians of the world, unite!” I assume that this change from Communism to a town looking to live off tourism and other sources of income may have also caused some challenges there?

Absolutely. The town itself, and especially the region around it, is now very right-wing. So you have that element present there, too. And there’s the Kyffhäuser monument [to Emperor Friedrich I Barbarossa] on the mountain that’s also in the film, and that is a bit of a symbol of German nationalism. So you really have a lot of layers there, which I found interesting.

You use a German song in the movie, “Die Schönsten Rosen Blüh’n in Sangerhausen” (“The Most Beautiful Roses Bloom in Sangerhausen”) by Bianca Graf. Did you know it before working on the movie?

That was also funny. The more I kept digging, the more stuff I found. There’s a whole genre of popular music connected to the city, and it expresses a bit of this feeling in the film, a sense of longing in this provincial town. The German poet Novalis, who is one of the inventors of German Romanticism, invented the blue flower as the symbol of romantic longing, of maybe wanting to be somewhere else. He came from a village very close to Sangerhausen. So, I thought: Okay, this is not just a place where you can imagine that people are longing for something else, but also where longing as a concept was invented.

Without spoiling anything for audiences, the film references such concepts as fate, destiny, and chance, plus loneliness, alienation, and longing. How did you approach bringing all these elements together and coming to a satisfying end?

I felt that the movie should lead to something like characters getting out of their loneliness and maybe creating some kind of community, even if it’s fragile. I wanted a connection to emerge. And I wanted to have different contemporary modifications of the feelings you described. So in the film, there’s a German working-class woman who had a child very early and just had to function and work two jobs, so that she could maybe never really develop a sense of what she wants in life, or what life could be. And when she meets a woman from the big city who plays music, she gets a feeling that life could be different, more than just getting by.

On the other hand, we have an Iranian immigrant who is a YouTuber and may have a longing for her home country and at the same time, she’s the kind of person who wanted to have an artistic career that didn’t really work out. Now she’s struggling and not connecting with other people because she’s so focused on her totally failed career. This is maybe something that I myself am sometimes scared of, losing a sense of connection, because you’re so focused on surviving in this super competitive, neoliberal environment we live in.

There is a blue stone that keeps showing up in the movie. Tell me a bit about that reference and how you came about it…

It took me a strange detour. There was the blue flower as the symbol of longing as a thematic thing, but I didn’t want to have a literal interpretation of that. The stone first shows up in a prologue that is set in the 18th century and has one of the characters’ great, great, great, great, great, great-grandmother who’s a servant. I thought it would be interesting to have this tradition of longing people. And while I was doing research on the 18th century, I was looking at what kind of strange jobs existed at that time. I found a book that talked about weird jobs from the 18th century, and one of them was the job of stone swallowers. These were people who traveled around the country and swallowed stones for the amusement of the local population. And I said, “Wow, that’s interesting, because we’re here in the mining country.” So, I wanted to have a stone swallower in the film.

And when I went to the local museum, I found out that a lot of the stones they got out of the mine there were copper stones, and they were bluish. So, we had the blue flower and blue stones, and I didn’t have to invent too much. It was just this snowball effect. Everything was already connected.

The film plays with the theme of ghosts or phantoms, referenced in the English title of the movie, maybe ghosts of the past or ghosts of lives that could have been. Did you ever encounter any phantoms during your shoot?

There were some surreal, almost ghost-like things that happened to me while shooting the movie. For example, we kept observing birds of prey flying around in this region. So, the DOP [Faraz Fesharaki] and I decided to sacrifice a day off on a weekend to film some birds of prey. But, of course, the moment we decided to film them, they all disappeared. We stood in some meadows for hours. No birds! And the moment we went back to the car and drove off, they all came back.

And then a very strange thing happened. That evening, I was very frustrated. I opened my laptop. You know, when you open a MacBook, you have a profile symbol, which I never changed. It was always preinstalled, and it was a basketball in my case. That evening, for a strange reason, without me interfering, the basketball had transformed itself into the head of an eagle. And I said: “Oh, wow, we’re really dealing with magic currents here.”

Our history, especially German history, is built on many people who died horrible deaths and suffered, and in that region, that is very present. In some of the caves we visited, there were underground concentration camps where people from all over Europe had to work on weapons for the Nazis under horrible conditions. And many died. So you have that present, in a way, in this landscape that is so beautiful. There’s a cave with a strange metal stick coming out of the ceiling, and I asked the tour guide about it. He said, “The Nazis, the SS, always went there to take group photos. And this metal stick was used to hang some lights, or the camera.” So, those ghosts are there.

And if we broaden the scope. There’s also maybe the ghosts of friends we’ve lost. And there is also ghosting as a concept in the film. This idea of people disappearing for various reasons became a motif –from the most historical, cruel examples to the daily life cases. But, politically speaking, there are also more positive ghosts – the ghosts of past hopes or forgotten dreams we can maybe reconnect with.

Since you mentioned the Nazis, some characters in the film make disparaging remarks about foreigners, and in a car scene, the radio plays a comment from a politician criticizing migrants. Who was that, and why did you choose to include some of the other remarks?

The radio report was just taken from the news, and it was our chancellor [Friedrich Merz] speaking. When we were preparing and shooting the movie. It was the time before the last elections, and he tried to get right-wing votes with stupid stories that are not true about how migrants take away doctor appointments from Germans, for example, at the dentist. He basically said Germans can’t go to the dentist anymore because there are so many migrants in the dental offices having their teeth redone.  At the time, I had a big dental issue in my family, so I know that unfortunately, nobody gets their teeth redone for free, haha. But it was also interesting to me because previously I made a vampire movie, so there was another quest for teeth.

For me, it was important to show the political and media atmosphere because sometimes there’s this representation that people from East Germany are naturally racist, or something like that. I want to show that this racism is also a top-down phenomenon, and if you hear the German chancellor saying stuff like this, it may be no wonder that you develop resentments.

One woman in the film compares Germany to the Titanic, and Germans are like the sinking Leonardo DiCaprio. How did he come up with that? It reminded me a bit of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil.

I don’t know. The idea of Germany as a sinking ship is part of the right-wing discourse. But I thought, maybe people have these ambivalences. When she thinks about the Titanic, she also has to think of the cute Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s like a remnant of something else, buried under her bitterness. We didn’t want to have too simple caricatures of people. Because people saying that can also be lovely to each other in a way, and supportive. But then, when it shifts to something else, they are really horrible. So there’s this ambivalence, which we encountered a lot there. People are nice​, but there are these strange undercurrents that also make it very unpleasant in Germany sometimes. So in a way it’s both: the banality of evil, and maybe small seeds of hope.  In any case, this is the stifling atmosphere the protagonist Ursula is trying to escape from and to overcome within herself. Hannah Arendt also claims that people have a capacity for new beginnings.

Is this film different from your past work in any way other than the inspiration and genesis of the story?

Yes, this film is also very much an exploration of the visual side of cinema. It was the first time that I shot on analog Super 16mm, and the first time I worked with this DOP, Faraz Fesharaki. What was important to us, in addition to the thematic and comic side of the film, was the visual, poetic side, trying to invent interesting movements and zooms. That is why the film is not just telling a story in a totally straightforward way, but makes these kinds of little cinematic digressions. For example, we collected images we found interesting and decided whether to use them in the editing stage. So that had more of a documentary feeling, but at the same time, we assembled these images in a very associative way. Recreating a sensual atmosphere, but also opening up to more imaginary connections.

How did you find your cast, most of which is quite young?

Some of them, I found in the classic way through a casting process. One of them is already better known, Henriette Confurius, who has been in some bigger German films. And Clara Schwinning I actually discovered because she won a prize in Locarno two years ago for best actress [in the Filmmakers of the Present competition].

The others, I found through the casting process, and I found them very interesting and liked how they play. But there are also local people whom we just found on the streets and asked to play minor characters. I like to have a cast that has very different tonalities, a complex palette. And then there’s the older Korean man and his actual grandson. They are the father of a friend of mine and the nephew of that friend of mine. The man plays different characters in all of my movies. I like him a lot, and he has nothing to do with acting. He’s just a retired guy who has a lot of time, and I think he’s very charming. So, I like to have him in my films as some kind of a recurring presence. 

Do you know what you will do next?

I’m working on two new projects. One is in the very beginning, and I don’t know much myself where it will end up. The second one is me reworking a project that I interrupted. It was a Perestroika film, a historical film that played in the late ’80s, early ’90s, and had something to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then the war happened, the Russian attack against Ukraine, which changed the situation. So I need to rethink it a bit after a break to see what’s happening there, and how to integrate this new reality into the script. So I stopped, and I think I will rework that as a Soviet-era river barge punk melodrama or something like that.