Les Nouveaux Riches Magazin – Pia Hellenthal. Searching Eva

Pia Hellenthal. Searching Eva

Searching Eva is the tale of a young woman growing up in the age of the internet, turning the search for oneself into a public spectacle, challenging you on what a woman „should be“. The Film dives into Eva´s constantly changing life over the course of three years, following her through Berlin, Italy, Mexico and Greece like flipping through her Instagram profile.

Text: Cargo Collective

You meet her lovers, her dad´s new kids and her mom who is still living in her teenage room at her parents´ house. You see her walking fashion shows, meeting sugar daddies in bourgeois hotel rooms, shooting up ketamine in bathtubs, ironing her girlfriend´s hair, playing with her cat. Instead of following a straight line the film circles around current topics that Eva´s lifestyle naturally brings up – questioning your sexuality, your gender, the concept of work, the idea of a „fixed identity“. All of this is juxtaposed by her followers, commenting on Eva´s life, her new hairstyle, judging her actions, praising her person.

Online – where Eva showcases the most private parts of her life – reality and fiction seem to be inseparable. And so SEARCHING EVA floats between artificial staging and documentary observation, combining Eva´s blog – which leads as a voice over through her online published introspection – with everyday scenes, always followed by her online fans.

Pia Hellenthal is a Cologne based writer & director working in fiction and documentary. 2013 Hellenthal graduated from Academy of Media Arts Cologne with a Diploma in Media and Fine Art. Her short films screened at various international film festivals like Karlovy Vary, New York and Oberhausen and received prizes like the Prix H. R. Giger „Narcisse“ for best short. Next to her own films, Hellenthal has been working for publications like VICE, where her work got nominated for the Lovie Awards and licensed to international TV Stations.

For her debut film Searching Eva she received the 2016 Gerd Ruge Scholarship from Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, the Goethe Institut Film Residency in Beirut and took part in the dok.incubator Workshop 2018.