Pandora Motel is a film about a film being made—or perhaps never quite being made.

Greta (Nastasja Keller) is invited by two artists, The Russian (Mikael Eriksson) and The Little One with the Cap (Klaus Killisch), to take part in a musical called Pandora Motel. She agrees, but as the project drifts along, Greta realizes that she is the only one seriously trying to make it happen. The other two have become absorbed by a different question: why did the Ohio town of Pendleton change its name to Pandora in 1883? Was Pandora’s box opened that year?

Their investigation leads from Pandora, Ohio—a community shaped by Mennonite history—to the Anabaptist movement in Europe and Jan van Leiden, who proclaimed himself King John I of the “New Jerusalem” in Münster in 1534. From there, the search expands into a web of religious utopias, millenarian visions and apocalyptic narratives: the recurring desire to establish heaven on earth.

The film moves between Greta’s increasingly solitary inner world and the speculative, conspiracy-driven investigations of The Russian and The Little One with the Cap. Documentary fragments, fiction, music and historical research begin to overlap. What starts as the making of a musical gradually becomes a film about projection itself—about stories, beliefs and the desire to find connections where there may be none.

Is The Russian simply a romantic conspiracy theorist? Is The Little One’s cap really lined with poodle fur? And is this finally the film within the film in which the woman gets to tell the story?

The video project developed from the exhibition Pandora Motel, presented at Galerie Guardini, Berlin, in 2007.