RENT AN ACTOR

SYNOPSIS:

Imagine you could do everything differently again. Meet the son you never had, talk to your father before he left, spend an evening with your best childhood friend like in the old days. Rent an Actor allows people to become authors of their own dreams. With the help of actors who take the place of missing, lost or imagined persons as “representatives”, our film gives its protagonists the opportunity to try out another life, to experience what it would be like if their life had took a different turn.

Rent an Actor is Katarina Schröter’s second feature film. It is the consistent continuation of her documentary work. In her first film, The Visitor, she stood in front of the camera as a silent, non-speaking character and involved random encounters in Mumbai, Shanghai and Sao Paulo to a documentary epic about closeness and familiarity. Across all language obstacles, simply by coming together with people on an apparently forgotten level of wordless directness, she managed to look literally over there shoulder into various urban microcosms. The figure of the visitor stood as a counterpart for the people she met, so they could be who they wanted to be. A radically new concept in documentary.