Victoria

Sebastian Schipper's Victoria won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (specifically for Sturla Brandth Grøvlen's cinematography) at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2015. At the German Film Awards (Lola) the same year it dominated the ceremony with six wins including Outstanding Feature Film, Best Director, Best Actress for Laia Costa, Best Actor for Frederick Lau and Best Cinematography. The film is widely treated as one of the most technically ambitious German productions of the 2010s.

The film's structural distinction is the single 138-minute continuous take in which the entire feature is shot. Unlike Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman (2014, released months earlier), which used digital seam-stitching to construct the appearance of a single take from many separate ones, Victoria was actually shot in real time without cuts across one continuous take by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen on an Arri Alexa M handheld digital camera. The production attempted the take three times across three separate full-night shoots in Berlin (28 April, 29 April, 30 April 2014); the third complete take is the one in the released film.

The cast is led by Laia Costa (a Spanish actress who had been working principally in Catalan and Spanish productions before this) alongside Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski, Burak Yiğit and Max Mauff. The screenplay is a twelve-page outline by Schipper with Olivia Neergaard-Holm and Eike Frederik Schulz; almost all dialogue was improvised on set during the take. The score is by Nils Frahm. The film was shot largely in the Berlin districts of Mitte and Friedrichshain, including the Spree riverbanks and the Frankfurter Tor area; the night's geography is now widely referenced in academic discussions of single-take cinema and Berlin urban filmmaking.