Pia Marais' award-winng film is one of the most startling and assured feature debuts of recent years. Stevie, a wild but fiercely-intelligent 14-year old girl at the emotional heart of the film, must cope with the instabilities of her hippy parents. When they move to a small town in Germany, Stevie attempts to slip into a normal life. Whilst her parents escape their responsibilities, spending their days high, hooking up deals and filling the house with hangers-on, Stevie tries to make an impression on her new schoolmates, spreading stories of an imaginary and ideally-conventional homelife. An unblinking study of a girl caught up in a complicated adult world, THE UNPOLISHED also presents an ambivalent image of the fall-out from a counter-culture gone bad. What shines through is the resourcefulness of a girl who deserves, and is determined to get, something better, as Stevie makes the real journey towards maturity and independence that her parents ought to have made years ago. THE UNPOLISHED is humanist filmmaking of the highest order.

***

On the road in with drifter mother Lily (Pascale Schiller) while dad Axel (Birol Ünel) is serving time for slinging dope, 13-year-old Stevie (Céci Chuh) expects that the trio will head back to Portugal when her father gets out from behind bars. When it's subsequently announced that they will instead be staying in Germany and living in the home of her recently deceased grandfather, Stevie does her best to make due despite the constant presence of lazy layabout Ingmar (Georg Friedrich) and promiscuous Louise (Joana Preiss) -- who have come to stay with the family indefinitely. As Stevie begins to recognize just how harshly her chaotic home life seems to contrast the lives of her relatively "normal" peers, she begins to construct an elaborate web of tall tales in a desperate effort to fit in. Later, while attempting to enrol in school, the troubled youngster finds her attempts to conform continually thwarted by her lackadaisical parents.

Excerpt from Second Run's website located HERE