
HEART BEATS
Children's film in development
SYNOPSIS
11-year-old LIA has a special talent: she can effortlessly transform all the everyday sounds that surround her into rhythms. An ability that probably comes from her mother, a drummer who died in an accident 6 years earlier. Since then, Lia has lived with her father as a family of two in a lively Zurich neighborhood. A living together that does not go entirely smoothly, since Lia's uncontrolled tantrums have already led to her having to change schools twice. Chris is determined to get to grips with the problems with a radical change of location. He and Lia will move to his girlfriend SONJA on the outskirts of Vienna.
Lia, who is in the midst of pre-puberty, finds the idea of having to live in a terraced housing estate with a stepmother, who is also the principal of her new school, and her daughter PAULINE (15), who has Down syndrome, horrible and switches to general resistance to be on the safe side. However, she soon realizes that she can use support for her goal of separating her father and Sonja again and therefore teams up with Pauline, who manages to get behind Lia's spiked dress with her empathetic and unconditionally honest impartiality. The two girls play lots of pranks on their parents, which become more and more outrageous and actually confuse Chris and Sonja quite a bit.But the game with the parents backfires at times and instead of separation, a wedding is suddenly on the agenda.
When everything becomes too much for Lia, she likes to escape to the nearby wasteland. There she meets LUIS, a 12-year-old boy with a Brazilian mother who has stored his drum kit in an abandoned construction container. The always good-humored Luis, who on principle enters the classroom only after the bell rings, turns out to be Lia's seatmate with an intuitive understanding of her inner tensions.
Together with Luis, Lia also finds out that her mother's band still exists and that they will even play a concert in Vienna soon. She confronts Chris, who has always avoided her questions about her mother.
When Lia has such a tantrum at school that she accidentally breaks Sonja's finger, she knows she has gone too far, but at the same time hopes that her father will now go back to Zurich with her. But things turn out differently than expected...
CREW
WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY
Johanna Lietha
SCRIPT CONSULTANT
Wolfgang Widerhofer
PRODUCER
Karin Berghammer
PRODUCTION MANAGER
Barbara Eppensteiner
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT
Franziska Teresa Aringer
PRODUCTION

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