Quotes

[press conference for Gentle Monster (2026) at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival] I read a newspaper article about a big ring of paedophiles in Germany which was being discovered and then prosecuted, and it was a very explicit article and very hard to read - I read it over two days - and when I finished it, I was at a public pool with my daughter and my stepdaughters and I walked through the area and I couldn't look at the families the same way I had looked at them the day before. I obviously knew about sexual violence towards children, but I was not so aware......I do not only know victims - I must know perpetrators as well. And this is really where it started. I just felt helpless after reading it and I felt that the only thing that I could do, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, is make a film about it.

[Cannes press conference for Gentle Monster (2026)] I once read that "intelligence means accepting ambivalence". I think that's what's always very important for me in my storytelling – that each character is always the hero of their own story. Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. So this was my approach to all of the characters, even to the perpetrator. I didn't want to go in his perspective; I didn't want to explain what he's doing and why he's doing it - this was a story about how society, how people who love someone just deal with it. I learned so much in the research and the word I maybe heard the most was "shame". We have a shame to look there, we have a shame to talk about it. I could feel that everywhere when I went somewhere with the project, people were shying away. I knew this was not the easy path to make this film. It doesn't give you an answer or a solution to the problem. The idea of the film is to ask you questions - to ask us as a society questions and this is also why I'm also so very happy that the film gets this big stage of the Cannes Film Festival and the space of a big cinema to really unfold its impact and get all that attention, not only because of me as a filmmaker wanting to go to Cannes, but because of the subject matter. I've learned so much about it that I really deeply care about it and I would say the most important thing is prevention on many levels and this also means for all of us to educate our children and for institutions to educate our children to learn very early on about their boundaries, about which lines are not to cross here. You know what I don't do any more? I don't touch other people's kids any more. I did that a lot – like cuddling them and touching their hair – I don't do it, because they learn that it's acceptable to be touched by anyone. I cannot talk about all my research here, obviously, but we can do something about it, but we have to be aware that it's a problem.