I have been an avid reader of Stefan Zweig for many years as well as an avid cinephile. With my feature debut, those passions will collide and coalesce into a movie I hope will speak to wide audiences. CONFUSION explores how internal psychological states can be translated into cinematic form through inventive visual and narrative approaches. By adapting Stefan Zweig’s 1926 novella, the project seeks to reintroduce his work to contemporary audiences, reframing its themes of mentorship, obsession and repressed queer longing in a modern context to make visible their enduring relevance. It will be aimed at international film festival competition status and subsequent theatrical release.
The story centers on Roland, a bright but directionless university student plagued by his overindulgence. Things go too far, so his father sends him away to a different university in a quieter place. On his first day of class, he finds himself more enraptured by this professor and his lecture than he’d ever been by anything. In the course of that hour, his whole life’s trajectory shifts from a life of vices to one of knowledge. His thirst, in turn, propagates another kind of thirst in the man he most looks up to, his professor.