A Berlin-set film that follows Leonie and her friends as they live through the unsettling pleasures of reading Anna Maria Ortese, inviting viewers to share in the intimate work of meaning-making
Ted Fendt’s Foreign Travel turns reading into a shared, bodily event rather than a private habit. The film orbits Leonie (played by co-writer Leonie Rodrian), a thirty-something whose fascination with the Italian writer Anna Maria Ortese becomes the engine of the story. Rather than marching toward a tidy plot, the movie unfolds as a year in Kreuzberg—an episodic calendar of encounters in which books act as catalysts, unsettling routines and reshaping the way people relate to one another.
Books here are agents, not props. Fendt stages scenes of communal attention—people leaning over the same page, reading aloud, trading glances—and lets meaning accumulate slowly. Shot on 16mm, the camera often lingers: a thumb rests between pages, a mouth tightens around a difficult sentence, a smile arrives a beat after comprehension. Those small, physical signs of absorption—furrowed brows, shifting posture, the pause before a sentence is resumed—turn interpretation into something you watch happen rather than something you are simply told.
Characters and their texts
Leonie convenes a modest reading circle. Hanna, pregnant, reads Ortese through feeling and image; Alejo, from Buenos Aires, listens for cadence and cultural echoes; Florian, who dropped out of university, wrestles with abstraction and pacing. They focus on two Ortese works—The Iguana (1965) and Il Porto di Toledo (1975)—both of which blur memoir and fantasy. The group’s conversations map how personal history, attention, and tolerance for ambiguity shape interpretation: where Hanna is moved, Alejo traces rhythm; where Florian stumbles, the others pick up nuance.
The film doesn’t promise a single, definitive reading. Instead, it treats comprehension as emergent—born of debate, re-reading, and tiny adjustments in gesture. Meaning is distributed across people, voices, and the camera’s gaze; the page is only the beginning.
How the camera makes reading legible
Fendt’s visual strategy insists on reading as performance. Jenny Lou Ziegel’s cinematography privileges medium-close framing and static takes that let micro-movements register: eyes lift from the text to the window, a hand hesitates on a paragraph, a shoulder relaxes with recognition. Close-ups of hands and pages alternate with group shots so the film can catch both individual absorption and communal response. Shot–reverse–shot patterns put text and spectator in conversation, and the long holds invite a kind of attention that mirrors the slow work of deep reading.
Sound design complements these images. Cuts often follow the rhythm of a sentence: a phrase on the page finds an echo in a listener’s face. The rustle of paper, the scrape of a chair, a breath drawn sharply—these small diegetic sounds are not background texture but part of the film’s grammar. Silence, too, is active: when ambient noise recedes the viewer gets space to inhabit the characters’ thoughts. Off-screen space is teased as meaningfully as what’s shown; responses outside the frame are suggested rather than spelled out.
Reading as ethics and experiment
If the film is a portrait of attention, it is also a provocation. By withholding full text and privileging fragments—spoken lines, half-seen pages—Fendt forces viewers to reconstruct sentences in their heads. That process aligns Foreign Travel with reader-response ideas: meaning doesn’t simply live in a line of print but arises in exchange between speaker, camera, and listener. The result asks more of audiences than passive viewing. To follow the film you must listen for tonal shifts, watch faces for small cues, and tolerate ambiguity.
These formal choices carry ethical and psychological implications. Prolonged attention in the movie becomes an act of care: sustained listening reshapes subjectivity, blurs the boundary between life and fiction, and exposes the porousness of identity under the influence of a demanding text. In an era that rewards speed and surface skim, Fendt stages slow reading as both an aesthetic posture and a political stance.
Cinematic company and lineage
Formally, Foreign Travel sits in a conversation with filmmakers who take reading seriously on screen. Where Matías Piñeiro often makes textual surfaces visible and James Benning foregrounds silence as a space of thought, Fendt combines audible passages with withheld text and a strong emphasis on embodied reading. The film recruits the spectator into the work of reconstruction: reward comes through patience and concentration.
At its Berlinale 2026 premiere, Foreign Travel arrived as a small manifesto for a different viewing economy—one that privileges the endurance of attention over the swoop of immediate gratification. It asks viewers to slow down, listen closely, and watch how literature alters perception.
Books here are agents, not props. Fendt stages scenes of communal attention—people leaning over the same page, reading aloud, trading glances—and lets meaning accumulate slowly. Shot on 16mm, the camera often lingers: a thumb rests between pages, a mouth tightens around a difficult sentence, a smile arrives a beat after comprehension. Those small, physical signs of absorption—furrowed brows, shifting posture, the pause before a sentence is resumed—turn interpretation into something you watch happen rather than something you are simply told.0