Family Romance, LLC

In Japan you can hire a family member, a partner or a colleague, if you need somebody to bring along to a party – or to deal with a difficult situation at work. An ideal premise for a filmmaker like Werner Herzog, who in his latest hybrid film has cast the actor Yuichi Ishii straight from reality, however surreal that may seem. In 'Family Romance LLC', both fiction and documentary should be put in quotation marks – as always with the idiosyncratic German filmmaker. But this time, he is exploring new depths. With an aesthetic style that would befit a foreplay scene of a porn movie and a true story that he could hardly have invented himself, Herzog has – according to several critics – created his strangest film in many years. And that says something!