WHEN A COMPLETE stranger arrives a little broken and very traumatised at your door seeking your care, you know something is afoot. When all she feels confident to do is cook a dish that you don’t know how to, the plot gets more complicated. Miroirs No. 3 is a film by Christian Petzold, featuring the inimitable Paula Beer in the role of Laura. It’s a murky and largely wordless journey through trauma, and you can see it at this year’s European Film Festival South Africa, where it screens in Johannesburg and Cape Town, 9-19 October 2025.

It is here where we meet Betty (Barbara Auer). Her gaze is intense and she seems to be a beautiful extra, as Laura and her friends whizz past her house, on their way to the sea. Only, there’s something about Laura. She’s unsettled in her soul and the knitted jersey she wears is unravelling in a way that makes her look homeless. A party pooper. One who doesn’t want to be where she is.

And then fate delivers a hand and things turn surreal. A spontaneous and anger-fuelled drive back to the train station and a sudden death brings Laura back at Betty’s home, where she fits uncannily into the stream of things. Domestic and otherwise. This tale of Chopin and Ravel brought to life on an out-of-tune piano with moody silences and devastatingly subtle filmography that offers the kind of construction and balance that the plot itself doesn’t, is one of reflection. It is about absence. And the character of Yelena, Betty’s daughter fills those gaps and takes hold of the broken parts with presence.

But it is also a yarn of mystery and how one holds the deepest of pains and sharpest of taboos close to one’s heart. Because words are too lumpen a medium to use to describe certain realities. Miroirs No. 3 is a poem in washes of grey and pink about misplaced intimacies and assumed warmths between strangers, and rather than a tale with a clear chronology, it is one that conveys itself with washes of colour and the smell of home.

• Miroirs No. 3 is written and directed by Christian Petzold and features a cast headed by Barbara Auer, Paula Beer, Matthias Brandt, Philip Froissant, Marcel Heuperman, Hendrik Heutmann, Christian Koerner, Victoire Laly and Enno Trebs. It is produced by Anton Kaiser, Florian Koerner von Gustorf, Michael Weber and Julius Windhorst and features creative input by Hans Fromm (cinematography), Bettina Böhler (editing), Alexandra Montag (casting), Kade Gruber (production design) and Katharina Ost (costumes). In German with English subtitles, it is part of the 12^th European Film Festival in South Africa, screening at The Bioscope independent cinema in Milpark, Johannesburg, The Labia in Cape Town and Hyde Park NuMetro in Johannesburg, 9-19 October 2025.