Urša Menart Turns the Influencer Economy Inside Out in 'Everything That's Wrong With You,' Premiering at Sarajevo
Slovenian writer-director Urša Menart's second feature, Everything That's Wrong With You, has had its world premiere in the narrative feature competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival (Variety).
The film follows Maruša, played by Anuša Kodelja, who returns to Slovenia after living in Berlin following the death of her mother from cancer. There she befriends Alja, a nurse in a small coastal town in Germany, played by Klara Kuk. The cast also includes Matija Vastl, Kaja Ocvirk, Mojca Fatur, and Ivana Percan Kodarin (Screen Daily).
Menart told Variety the idea grew out of a phenomenon she found both fascinating and unsettling: young people, mostly women, fabricating tragic life stories online to attract followers, and then those followers travelling across continents to visit the micro-influencers they had met through these invented narratives. The thing that gripped her most, she said, was not the deception itself but the genuine human need it exposed — people reaching out for connection in whatever form they could find (Variety).
That theme has personal roots. Menart said the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic and becoming a mother for the first time left her feeling lonely, which set her thinking about why people seek connection in the first place (Variety).
The film also reaches into broader territory — the burden of caring for others, the social pressure to couple up and have children, and the hypersexualised world of online dating. Menart said she chose to focus on two young women because that is her own perspective, and because she believes women's lives remain rich and largely unexamined on screen (Variety).
The project took nearly seven years to reach production. During that long development period, Menart worked on other films, including her first feature, My Last Year as a Loser (Variety). The script was presented at the co-production market of the 73rd Berlinale in February 2023 (Slovenian Film Centre).
Everything That's Wrong With You is a Slovenia/Germany/Serbia co-production, produced by Katja Lenarčič of Vertigo Ljubljana (Slovenian Film Centre).
For a film that began with one director wondering why strangers invent heartbreak for strangers, it has arrived on a festival competition platform carrying questions that stretch well beyond one story: what people owe each other online, what connection costs, and what happens when the screen goes dark.
