Rainer toils by the sweat of his brow on a building site to meet his family’s needs. His wife Nadine is pregnant with their second child, and the family has just bought a house in need of renovation. But when Rainer is demoted to construction worker, he has to cope with both the private humiliation and the loss of income. While he desperately tries to keep pleasing everyone, he loses sight of his 13-year-old daughter Doreen who has entered into an ambivalent and threatening friendship with their neighbor’s daughter. The pressure on the small family becomes ever greater.
Presentation of the director + Q&A with the director and producer
Mia Maariel Meyer — (Braunschweig, Germany, 1981) is half German half Finnish. She studied film and screenwriting in New York and London. She finished her studies with a Master of Arts in Filmmaking at the University of Goldsmiths in 2008. Back in Germany, she focused on documentary films and reportages. She won the Grimme Online Prize for the documentary 140 Seconds in 2012. Her film Upstairs was screened at the Hof International Film Festival in 2015 and released in theaters in 2016. The Seed is her second long feature.
«The tone in our society has become rougher. The pressure to perform and the fear of losing what we have worked for so hard are part of our daily life and slowly impact our moral compass. My movie poses the question: “How much pressure and competition does it take until we finally break?” […] The Seed is to me a social thriller in which pressure is the antagonist deconstructing the individual, destroying families, creating an even larger gap between poor and rich and most importantly making it impossible for our children to feel safe.»
(Mia Maariel Meyer)
Die Saat (The Seed, 2021)
Treppe Aufwärts (Upstairs, 2015)
Manou (short, 2013)
Vater (Father, short, 2011)
140 seconds (doc., 2012)
Heimweh (Homesick, short, 2010)
Brief an meine Eltern (A Letter to my Parents, short, 2010)
Heritage (short, 2006)
