Stefan Ramírez Pérez

In his work, Stefan Ramírez Pérez offers up a series of profiles of aspiring and former actresses in Los Angeles. Initially, the four women speak with apparent openness and candor about their daily concerns and problems, as well as their anxieties about the future. These range from tales of laborious auditions and insights into their feelings of self-doubt to accounts of physical collapse on stage. One of the women them has given up on her dream after she finding she could no longer deal with the pressure, neither psychologically nor physically, while another tells us how she has learned to become both more self-critical and self-assured. The individual interviews are interspersed with scenes in which the four women act out a personal crisis, breaking down on the red carpet in despair at the weight of the psychological pressure. In the second part of the film, the actresses are shown at work. Each of them learns a monologue by heart and auditions on a theater stage wearing a blond wig, before finally reenacting the story of a former colleague’s blackout on the red carpet they had told earlier. Their moving individual fates blend together to form a whole, forming a dramatic visualization of ›disillusionment‹.

Working with a mixture of reconstructions and documentary footage, the young artist from Cologne succeeds in revealing the hidden, unvarnished side of Hollywood’s dream factory. On the one hand, Ramírez Pérez raises the question of authenticity, while on the other, he compassionately describes the delicate balancing act between success and failure. He shows us young actresses who encounter harsh realities in their search for success, and who struggle with problems of personal identity. (Justus Lambrecht)