Afire

Afire (Roter Himmel, 2023) is a German drama directed by Christian Petzold — watch it online on iFILM. The film picked up the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. Thomas Schubert plays Leon, a self-absorbed writer who travels to a friend's Baltic Sea cottage to finish his second novel and finds the house already taken by a carefree stranger named Nadja (Paula Beer).

Leon bristles at every interruption. He can't write, can't connect, can't stop fixating on his manuscript while wildfires creep through the pine forests just beyond the tree line. The smoke thickens day by day. The sky goes red at dusk. His best friend adapts to all of it easily. Leon does not.

Petzold frames disaster as background noise — the fires are real and closing in, yet the film stays stubbornly focused on one insufferable man slowly cracking open. That tonal balance is harder to pull off than it looks. Stream Afire (2023) online on iFILM.