Director’s Statement

FRACTION is, on its surface, a noir story about a ring that changes hands. Underneath that, it's a question I can't stop asking myself: what actually makes up a person? Not the legal version, the real one. Memory, instinct, desire, the small routines nobody else notices. How much of that is chosen, and how much is just worn in.

I built the world of the film to keep most of that answer in the dark on purpose. Shadows aren't decoration, they're a statement about how much we're allowed to know, about ourselves and about each other. FRACTION uses that darkness literally: characters acting on information the audience doesn't fully have, motives half-lit and a city split between gleaming visibility and total obscurity.

The split isn't just a striking image, it's the anxiety underneath the whole film. We're moving toward a future where technology and economics promise to preserve us, upgrade us, carry us forward and yet it feels like the promise quietly threatens the very thing it claims to protect. None of it is there just for spectacle. The high towers advertising eternal life through avatars saved on digital Clouds exist in the same world in which people live unhoused, undernourished and unseen.

This duality isn't new nor invented. I've moved to Berlin less than two years ago. Most mornings I take the U8 from Neukölln into the city center - if you know, you know - then switch to an S-Bahn that rides right between the high-rises and glossy shopping streets, with trams and LED Ad-Screens and tourists enjoying their visit. It's a strange transition, every single time: from something gritty and dark but vast with dead and empty spaces, into something confined, illuminated, monumental; a world built entirely for commerce and spectacle. People get lost in this city. It's not an easy one. But I moved here anyway, because Berlin is also full of people who create things and hold each other up with a real sense of solidarity, even in the middle of all the noise. Visually, FRACTION shows Berlin the way I've actually experienced it, especially in winter, when there are no days, only dark and bright phases of one long night.

The question explored isn't really new to me. I've been asking a version of it for a long time, long before there was a ring or a script: how much of me is just the world, worn into a shape, and how much is left over that is mine?

I don't think the film answers that. I don’t think it's supposed to. But I wanted every choice: the ring, the two worlds, the silence around what people really know to sit inside that unease rather than explain it away.

That's the direction I'm chasing.