(courtesy IMDb)
Being part of a solid and constant group of mutually supportive, caring friends is undoubtedly one of life’s great and often enduring gifts.
Far from having to navigate life alone, we can do it, with all of its challenges and opportunities, its highs and lows, triumphs and deplorable f**k-ups, with likeminded souls beside us who get what we’re going through and who can be there when we need more support than our own resilient selves can provide.
The trick here though is that wonderful though these people may be that they are as fallible as we are, and while it would lovely to think we will glide serenely from one life moment to another, the truth is that these journeys, even shared with friends, can be a great deal more bumpy and imperfect than we would like.
Just how messy and flawed things can get becomes abundantly clever in director David Dietl’s 2024 film, Long Story Short (Feste & Freunde – Ein Hoch auf uns!), which opened the 2025 German Festival, in which a group of friends, their stories told over three years from the start of the COVID pandemic to when the worst of it petered out in 2023, go through six major life events.
Kicking things off is New Year’s Eve 2019 where married couple, Natalie and Maya (Jasmin Shakeri) and Katia Fellin) are hosting a party for their nearest and dearest films in their impossibly gorgeous and trendy inner city apartment where they, at that point in time at least, are deliriously and wondrously in love.
Not so the friends who join them.
While Marieke and Adam (Annette Frier and Trystan Pütter respectively) are married, with two kids proving they’ve had sex at least twice, they aren’t happy; Marieke forever nags the well-meaning but hapless Adam, a dynamic clear to all their friends but robustly ignored by the two who are clearly trying to muddle through their less-than-ideal marriage.
Along to welcome in 2020 are Rolf (Nicholas Ofczarek), Marieke’s sweet single brother and Dina (Pegah Ferydoni) who begin an awkward conversation before realising that actually they rather like, the love, the fact that each of them ended up at this party without someone else.
There are three other key people at the wedding, two of them connected in a way that stands a very good chance of renting the tight circle of friends asunder, something tolerated but not appreciated by others in the group who though they may try to be supportive are all too aware that if this things go south, they’ll pay the price in one way or another.
The two deceptively connected twosome are Sebastian (Ronald Zehrfeld), married to a super successful, workaholic architect who’s also part of the group (though not super closely), and Ellen (Laura Tonke), a medical colleague of Natalie, who somehow keeps believing in love even against all chaotic evidence to the contrary.
She is, despite her fervent love of being in love, a walking disaster area, and while she’s blissfully happy in her adulterous circle with novelist Sebastian, it’s becoming clear that this illicit relationship is going nowhere, and apart from not really making her happy deep down, it reminds her constantly that is alone and even among her friends, uncomfortably alone at times.
Over this party, and subsequent events through 2020 to 2023 including an unapproved birthday party during lockdown, a wedding, a christening, an apartment house party and a birthday, which ends Long Story Short on a warmly happy note, it is Ellen around whom many events take place, largely because as the solo member of the group, she is usually the one with the perspective to see how many dynamics play out.
The one wildcard is all this tightknit if flawed friendships – though they largely get on well, that’s not always the case with some arguments lasting months, something which causes sadness and agony once the anger has subsided – is the presence of Max (Henning Flüsloh) whom a dejected Ellen meets after she leaves the New Year’s Eve party early and with whom she has a near instant and effervescently funny rapport.
It’s clear they are meant for each other, but this is life and it rarely plays fair and in our best interests and over the ups and downs of the friendship group, it is Max and Ellen who keep moving in and out of each other’s orbit and who clearly are going to be the full stop to this nuanced and quite lovely tale about the power of friendship to smooth out the messes and obstacles of life (even when, let’s be honest, they have often caused them in the first place).
With friendships brought to life by exemplary performances that feel as real and authentic as you’ll get in only the best written of films – screenwriter Elena Eenft absolutely nails the cadence and rhythm of long-term friends, meaning Long Story Short feels quite naturalistic all the way through, a fact which only adds to its considerable charm – this movie is a love letter to the power of friendships to, if not able to stop the worst of life happening to you, at least the journey to the other side of all that emotional chaos feel not just survivable but pretty wonderful at times too.
With a beautifully judged pace and a sense of grounded realness that never really puts a foot wrong, Long Story Short is a quiet joy of a film, even in its more disrupted or darker moments, reminding us that while we can’t have any guarantees about how life will behave or how our friends will respond, that we can be certain they will be there, however imperfectly.
It’s that gloriously reassuring truth that permeates every affecting word and moving moment in Long Story Short which nails how crappy life can be and how we can often be our own worst enemies, but how, our friends, the people who really get us and know us and love us, will be the difference between making it and not, and in the uncertain crapshoot of living, that’s as close to a sure thing as we’re ever going to get.