Sarah Miro Fischer’s The Good Sister premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlinale, and the most striking thing about it is what it refuses to tell you. You never learn for certain whether the brother did it.
Looking at the perpetrator as someone amongst us, and not the other, the far away person.
A Question From a Protest Banner
The film began at a feminist demonstration, where Fischer saw a sign that read, in effect, why do I know so many victims of sexual violence but almost no perpetrators. That question lodged itself in her. The cultural reflex, she realized, is to picture the perpetrator as someone far away, a monster, a stranger, anyone but the men we actually know, precisely so we never have to weigh the possibility against the people we love. The Good Sister refuses that exit. It makes the accused a beloved older brother and the witness his devoted sister, Rose (Marie Bloching), who has moved into Sam’s small Berlin apartment after a breakup and is then asked to testify in the investigation when a woman accuses him of rape. Fischer chose the sibling bond deliberately, because it is among the closest relationships a person has, formed over a whole shared life, and because it carries a built-in blind spot. The us-versus-them instinct she wanted to dismantle is the quiet certainty that it cannot happen here, not in my family, not among my people.
The Withheld Answer Is the Whole Point
Here’s the stance worth drawing out. The film’s refusal to confirm Sam’s guilt gets described, even by Fischer herself, as a story engine, the open question that keeps you watching the way a whodunit does. But the withholding is doing something sharper than suspense. By locking us entirely inside Rose’s perspective and denying us the one fact that would resolve everything, the film reproduces in the audience the exact trap it is about: the impossibility of seeing clearly the people closest to us. We do not get to know whether Sam is guilty for the same reason Rose cannot know, because proximity is not clarity, because love is its own kind of blindness, because the closer you stand to a person the harder it is to see their whole shape. The “did he do it” question is not a hook the film dangles and then cheats. It is the film’s subject, handed to the viewer as a predicament rather than a puzzle. Fischer found the structure by settling early on a single perspective, Rose’s and only Rose’s, then building a net of people around her and an external thread to tie her to the world beyond the apartment. The result plays as a character study, Rose placed in one impossible situation after another so we can watch how she bends.
You will have to choose who you believe.
The Cruelty in the Title
This is where the title turns. “The good sister” is not a description, it is a trap, two incompatible definitions of goodness that cannot both be satisfied. Rose can be loyal to her brother or honest before the law and toward another woman, and the film hands her, and us, no way to be good without a wound. Fischer keeps the storytelling tight and physical, placing particular emphasis on body language to carry what dialogue will not, the camera staying close on Bloching as her posture and her face register doubt she cannot say aloud. When Fischer says the film is made to spark discussion afterward, she is being modest about what is really a formal argument: that the discomfort of not knowing is not a flaw to be resolved but the only honest place to leave an audience, because certainty about the people we love is the comforting lie.
The Accusation Engine
Her one stated touchstone makes the lineage clear.
Fischer and Marcus land on Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, the Mads Mikkelsen drama in which an accusation detonates a community and everyone is forced into presumption. The difference is instructive: Vinterberg, in the end, shows us his man is innocent, where Fischer never lets us off that hook at all. The film also belongs in conversation with two works she does not name: Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, the great study of competing truths in which the viewer must finally choose whom to believe, and Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, which insists, as Fischer does, that the perpetrator is the ordinary man among us rather than a distant villain.
How She Got Here
Fischer came to directing sideways. She grew up across several arts, violin from the age of five, then painting, photography, and writing, without a way to tie them together, until acting in school theater led her to keep suggesting to directors where her character should stand. That instinct pointed at directing. She studied at a film school in Bogota, then at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin, where The Good Sister became her graduation feature, following her well-received short Spit.
Preparation, Meet Adaptability
For all the moral weight, the conversation is also a working filmmaker’s primer, and the episode’s title names her method. Fischer rehearsed with her two leads for about two weeks before the shoot, improvising around the characters rather than running the actual scenes, building the muscle memory of a sibling relationship so the dynamic would feel lived-in on the day. That preparation existed precisely so she could adapt when reality intervened. She tells a perfect story about a two-day birthday scene where the second day brought heavy rain they could not afford to reshoot around, so the director, the actors, and the camera operator rewrote the scene together on the spot. It worked, until a test audience insisted the real rain looked fake, and she cut it. Preparation buys you the freedom to improvise; the set, she says, is where she stops fretting over what is not yet confirmed and simply works with what is there, which she finds freeing. The same trust carried into the cut. She and her editor approached the footage separately, then argued it out scene by scene, always granting that the other person’s instinct held something reasonable, testing it, and only then deciding. She picture-locked on a mix of real confidence and a deadline she could not extend again, because a film, left open, will loop forever.
Knowing the Business
Fischer is unusually clear-eyed about the part of filmmaking that happens after the film. Made as a DFFB graduation project on modest German state funding, threaded through the country’s complicated net of public money and television co-financing, the film still had to claw its way to completion, and Berlin’s recent culture cuts loom over the conversation. Just as notable, she had her world sales locked before the premiere, a rarity, since most filmmakers arrive at their premiere with no sales in place. She signed with New Europe Film Sales after meeting many agents around the San Sebastian work-in-progress showcase, and chose them on two criteria worth repeating: that they genuinely understood what the film was trying to say, so they would speak the same language in every decision down the line, and that the relationship felt fair and open rather than a game of push and pull. Her advice to her younger self fits the whole ethic. Do not overthink the leap, just take it, stay awake to what comes, and get a little better with money.
