Three Peaks

Aaron (Alexander Fehling) and Frenchwoman Lea have been a couple for two years now. They are joined by Tristan, Lea's eight-year-old son, who is growing up with them as well as with his biological father. Lea left the latter for Aaron at the time. Before the small patchwork family makes their planned move to Paris, a vacation together in a remote Dolomite hut should bring Aaron and Tristan closer together. The three of them are finally to become a new family. Aaron approaches the boy lovingly, but Tristan's loyalty to his “real” father, who is constantly present even on vacation with regular phone calls, begins to tear the boy apart. Lea tries to mediate, while Aaron is less and less able to deal with this conflict in her presence. When Aaron and Tristan are separated during a high alpine mountain hike and impenetrable fog rolls in, a catastrophe seems inevitable ... Director Jan Zabeil (“The Shaman and the Snake”) has created a dark family portrait that thrives on its subtly staged symbolism. Small interactions of everyday life slowly blend into the picture of a family that radiates harmony on the outside but is tense to the breaking point on the inside. The impressive mountain panorama itself plays a central role in the tense drama and not only becomes an existential challenge, but also reflects the complicated family network. “A constellation like the one in “Drei Zinnen”, Jan Zabeil's second feature film, is unusual. As a rule, cinema deals with the estrangement between adults and their stepchildren either through the medium of comedy or melodrama. And by the time the child calls the new man in his mother's life “dad”, all problems would have been solved. Against this kind of simplification, which always has the happy ending firmly in view, Jan Zabeil sets a barely untangled web of psychological games and dependencies.” “Drei Zinnen” is a film of reflections and reversals. It begins in a valley by a lake and ends at a frozen pond high up in the Dolomites. At the beginning it is son Tristan who learns to swim, at the end Aaron has to fight his way to the surface. [...] The grandiose Cinemascope images, which portray the narrowness of the hut just as intensely as the sublimity of the landscape, the atmospherically incredibly dense sound design and the natural, psychologically extremely differentiated acting of Alexander Fehling, Bérénice Bejo and Arian Montgomery interlock perfectly.” (Sascha Westphal, on: epd-film.de)