Menart's Parasocial Dramedy Premieres at Sarajevo
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- Urša Menart conceived "Everything That's Wrong With You" after noticing young women inventing tragic backstories online to attract followers who would travel across continents to meet them, with COVID-era isolation and her own experience becoming a first-time mother deepening the themes over a nearly seven-year development process.
- The film follows Maruša (Anuša Kodelja), grieving her mother's death from cancer after returning to Slovenia from Berlin, who befriends Alja (Klara Kuk), a nurse in a small German coastal town — a relationship tested when they finally meet in person.
- Anuša Kodelja and Klara Kuk each auditioned for the opposite role, which Menart said revealed personality traits missing from the script and led her to spend a year reworking the characters around what each actress brought.
- Menart cast and shot in Heringsdorf, Germany, drawn to its flat coastal landscape as a visual counterpoint to Slovenia's steep terrain, though the tourist town lacked production infrastructure, forcing a minimal-equipment shoot with small vans.
- Menart explicitly framed the film as a counterpoint to the dominant male-loneliness discourse, choosing to focus on women's interior lives and explore the burden of caring, the pressures of coupling up and bearing children, and online dating's hypersexualized culture.
- The film is produced by Slovenia's Vertigo in co-production with Germany's Chromosom Film and Tidewater Pictures, Serbia's Living Pictures, and RTV Slovenija, with support from the Slovenian Film Centre, Creative Europe MEDIA, and others.
- Menart, who previously directed "My Last Year as a Loser," worked on that project during the long gap while continuing to research and develop the new film through Sarajevo's CineLink industry program before its competition premiere.
Why it matters: Menart deliberately enters the global loneliness conversation from a female perspective at a moment when cultural discourse has fixated on the male loneliness epidemic and the manosphere — the Sarajevo competition slot gives the film a launchpad to reach programmers and distributors looking for precisely that counterweight. The seven-year development cycle and multinational co-production structure also show how smaller national cinemas are funding intimate character studies that larger markets have neglected.
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