Director Sarah Miró Fischer was born in Germany in 1993. She read film studies at the Escuela Nacional de Cine in Bogotá, Colombia and later worked on screenwriting, and improved her skills collaborating with other film producers in Berlin. Following a series of well-received shorts, including Spit (2021) that was awarded a mention at the imagine This Women’s International Film Festival in New York. Sarah Miró Fischer has directed her second feature ‘The Good Sister’ (2024).
‘The Good Sister’ has been attracting attention on the festival circuit, and in 2024 it won two industry awards at the San Sebastián Film Festival WIP Europa, and it will be screened as part of the Berlinale Panorama strand. When Rose breaks up with her girlfriend, she moves into her much -loved brother Sam’s tiny apartment to the chagrin of their mother. They share a strong and very special sibling bond, so she is profoundly thrown out of kilter when Sam is accused of rape by a girl that he brings home one night.
Rose cannot conceive of the possibility that her brother is guilty when she is asked to testify against him as part of the police investigation. Persuaded by his denials, “I am not a monster” she defends him, and it is only when she makes the effort to go and meet the accuser, a beautician, that she begins to question his guilt. This casts her into a turmoil of conflicting emotions as she tries to deal with the possibility that he is guilty and realizes all too acutely, how it will affect their relationship. The ground beneath her feet has moved, if she cannot be sure of someone so close to her, can she even be sure of herself?
Sarah Miró Fischer director
This challenges Rose’s sense of right and wrong and she has to reassess her own integrity as she faces this dilemma. Families are supposed to always support one another, you are linked, tied together. Can you ever really be impartial and free of those ties? What now?
Fischer has a knack of delving into the comfortable intimacy of relationships, that also can blind us and make it impossible to break away from the certainty of how we see another person, or think that we do. Especially when they are very close. Rose thinks she knows Sam and cannot imagine there is a side to him that she knows nothing about. Fischer questions whether it is possible to really know another person, regardless of how close you are. The performances are very subtle.
Jane Chirwa
You can feel a woman’s eye with the emphasis on the more intimate aspects between the characters, and Rose’s emotional responses are powerfully conveyed. There is that physical ease between siblings which comes through as Rose cuts her brother’s hair, finally shaving it off altogether, or helping him have a bath when his distress at the situation gets to him.
On the whole, however, the film risks the danger of wallowing too much in the ambiguity of the situation and how the characters interact, slowing the action down, with the possibility of losing the viewers on an emotional level.
The sound track is very interesting with simple effects and sounds that add to the tension and the drama of the situation Rose finds herself in, at moments expressed in the endlessly dripping tap that she fails to mend.
The Good Sister 2025
Director: Sarah Miró Fischer/ Writers: Sarah Miró Fischer, Agnes Maagaard Petersen/ Producers: Nina Sophie Bayer- Seer, Janna Fodor, Sebastian Herbst, Jorge Moreno Vergara and Luis Collar Carrió / DOP: Selma von Polheim Gravesen/ Editor: Elena Weihe/ Supervising Sound Designer: Jakob Mäsel / Music : Francesco lo Giudice/ Production Designer: Alina Dunker/ Arcanum Pictures (Potsdam- Germany) and Nephilim Producciones (Madrid, Spain).
CAST: Marie Bloching, Anton Weil, Proschat Madani, Jane Chirwa and Laura Balzer.
Will be available on MUBI – watch this space.
