Happy Birthday

Magdalena, the rich and decadent tenant of a beautiful house, organizes the birthday party of her favorite, Eric. She invites his young friends to the party but a mix of childish naivety and sexual energy pervades the atmosphere. The celebration turns out to be a vortex of folly driving the participants to the point of non-return during a biblical reenactment. Loosely inspired by “The Antique Wardrobe” by French author Georges Bataille and his theory of the relationship between love and death, Happy Birthday is nothing more than the representation of a dance of death.

About the Director

Born in 1989 in the South of Italy, Savio Debernardis is a film director and artist currently living and working in Berlin. He graduated with a bachelor degree in Art History and Archeology at the University of Sorbonne Paris-IV, later studying Fine Art at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC) where he held an artistic vision focused mostly on performance, video-art and illustration.  In 2016 he studied for one semester at the OTIS College of Los Angeles in California while simultaneously being a resident artist for the contemporary art museum of El Segundo (Los Angeles, California). Currently Savio is studying for his Masters in Film Direction at the Konrad Wolf university of film in Babelsberg. After taking part in many exhibitions in Europe, his art practice has shifted recently from video-art and performance into cinema. His first film was a mid-length experimental documentary film called PLAY in 2015. After this, he realized several short-films: Clementine, Baptiste, the documentary Alyha Love, commissioned by the German TV-channel RBB and his last film Happy Birthday. Currently he is working on his thesis film Artemisa.