Paperbird

Haus der Wünsche

Vanessa van Houten,

Germany, 2007, 101 min

In English

Canadian premiere

Script: Korbinian Greiner, Natalie Lambsdorff

Cast: Thomas Fränzel, Tschagsalmaa Borchuu, Lars Rudolph

Sunday, 9 November 2008, at 5:00 p.m

Innis Town Hall

PAPERBIRD is a story about love, lost childhood and the search for your own way.

Nic, an eclectic 23-year old young man is waiting in Bangkok for his lost luggage. Whilst searching for necessities of daily life, he is pulled into Bangkok. Like Alice in Wonderland, he stumbles with curiosity through a world unknown to him. When Nic meets Coco her spirit reminds him of a person he once knew in his childhood. He starts to remember his almost forgotten past und begins his journey to look for his „House of Wishes“. Nic is mesmerized by Coco and a love story begins...

Only if you can love yourself can you truly love someone else. Some of the people you meet in your life, you might only have a short but strong encounter, which has an impact that is life changing. The narrative was developed based on true life stories, which were researched in the prostitution districts of Thailand. The look of the film was inspired by the photographic works of Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki.

Vanessa van Houten

Vanessa van Houten was born in San Rafael, California in 1971. She grew up in the Bahamas, Berlin and Augsburg, Germany. After completing studies of Photography and Photo Design at Polytechnic University in Dortmund, she relocated to New York to study Anthology Film Archives in NYC. From 1997 – 2007 Vanessa studied at Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film, Munich in the Department of Feature Films and Telemovies. PAPERBIRD is her first feature film. Vanessa van Houten works as a Photographer and Filmmaker and lives in Melbourne, Australia.