Professional Filmmaker 7(work in progress)
by Michaël Reinhold with Yuzhi Chen
Country: USA / Germany
Genre: Hybrid Experimental Film / Performance / Documentary
Two filmmakers – Yuzhi Chen and performance artist Michaël Reinhold – set out to question what “professional” means in a film industry that is at once seductive and exploitative, glamorous and precarious. Beneath the red-carpet image lies a system defined by unstable jobs, unpaid labour, and the constant pressure to produce work that fits marketable formats.
The film unfolds as an open process: Yuzhi quietly shapes the frame from behind the camera, while Reinhold, whose practice is rooted in live performance, takes the screen through shifting personas, improvisations, and moments that blur reality and staging.
Narcolepsy, which disrupts his sleep–wake cycles, becomes a structural and poetic force: repetitions, gaps, and ruptures where sleep and failure meet. Filming moves between an intimate kitchen, a decaying water castle, and the sterile lights of IKEA – the latter turning into a stage for sharp consumer criticism and a metaphor for the creative conformity demanded not just by retail spaces, but by the cultural marketplace itself.
Less a polished product than an evolving conversation, Professional Filmmaker 7 keeps the process visible, embracing doubt, friction, and the conflicting desire to both belong to and escape the film and art world – questioning whether true independence can survive within the very industry it seeks to critique.
