STYX is the eighth film in Birds’ Eye View’s ‘Reclaim The Frame’ project, backed by the British Film Institute; a mission to bring ever-greater audiences to films by women to build a more balanced film future and offer cinema fans wider perspectives of the world.

 

Written by Ika Künzel

Written & Directed by Wolfgang Fischer

Cast:

Susanne Wolff, Gedion Odour Weseka

Austria/Germany

94 minutes

2019

606 Distribution

 

Rike, a keen naturalist and experienced yachtswoman, takes a break from her job as an ER doctor to pursue her dream of sailing to Ascension Islands, the Edenic paradise created under the guidance of Charles Darwin. A few days into her solo odyssey traversing the Southern Atlantic, her boat, the Asa Grey, is engulfed by a violent storm. When the storm finally passes, she is awoken to the unfolding humanitarian crisis of a ramshackle boat overloaded with African migrants slowly sinking on the horizon. With the fate of the migrants becoming increasingly desperate and her SOS calls seemingly unheeded, Rike is faced with an awful moral dilemma.

 

Premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, where it opened the Panorama Special section, STYX is a work of unrelenting intensity and technical brilliance. Aptly named after the mythological river that separates the living from the dead, STYX is an astute modern-day parable of Western indifference in the face of marginalized suffering.

 

“A much needed wake up call”

Little White Lies

“The intensity of a ticking-clock thriller”

Indie Wire

 

Join us for a post screening PANEL DISCUSSION hosted by Birds’ Eye View’s director-at-large, Mia Bays (an Oscar winning producer and agitator with 30 years’ experience in film). 

• Keme Nzerem – Presenter and Journalist reporting from around the globe on wide ranging issues from corruption, politics, and human rights.

• Dr. Pamela Kea – Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Sussex University Centre for Migration Research & International Development.

• Anna Smith –Film critic, broadcaster and the host of all-female film review show Girls On Film.