Winner of the Best Director prize at last year's Berlinale, Schanelec's latest feature confirms the German auteur's status as a modern master. Its title a nod to Yasujiro Ozu's 1932 classic I Was Born, But..., the film sets its puzzle-piece narrative in motion with the return of 13-year-old Phillip, whose unaccountable week-long disappearance in the wilderness has rattled his mother, Astrid (Maren Eggert). The film proceeds to oscillate between precision and enigma, headiness and sensuality as it chronicles a family in crisis and Astrid's newly triggered anxieties through an episodic narrative that includes a school production of Hamlet, a moonlit visit to a graveyard set to a haunting rendition of David Bowie's "Let's Dance," and a borderline absurd subplot related to the purchase of a used bicycle.