Family violence, intimate partner violence or violence against women are the expression of a fact: despite civilization and progress, violence perpetrated by a partner or ex-partner is an everyday occurrence for hundreds of thousands of women in Europe. In 2018, 41 women were murdered in Austria by their partners or ex-partners. That’s Western Europe’s best. Compared to Spain, for example, this was 5 times as many murder victims.

Nevertheless, there continues to be little public discussion or debate on the question. Most of society still associates this problem with the most vulnerable social groups, and immigrants. However, little consideration is given to the fact that domestic violence is subject to a much stronger taboo of silence amongst the privileged classes and therefore hardly ever reaches the public.

This is also the main reason why the film is set in Ibiza, in other words in an environment that does not at all correspond to this marginal-group cliché.
The perpetrator is an artist, one of us, a highly-educated person with no financial worries, who can afford to travel the world and live on a dream island. A person no one wants to imagine secretly acting violently against women.

He wears many faces and knows how to camouflage himself. The affected woman – self-confident and successful in everyday life – does not find her way out of the relationship of dependence out of fear and shame.
The film also describes the devastating effects of violence on the mental state of young people, the next generation. The damage done by violent experience in a young person’s personality development is on the other hand immense. Only a few are strong enough to resist. Usually pain and trauma are repressed and it is not uncommon for the model of violence to be repeated when those children grow up, as either victims or perpetrators. Each generation’s responsibility for passing on patterns of violence to the next cannot be underestimated. It is precisely here that a decisive dilemma of our civilization is revealed: we inherit violence.

The film is told from four perspectives, each telling its own story about the experience of violence, dealing with denial, repression, resistance and resignation. Each of these four reactions is connected with a search for love, and fear of rejection. All the characters are so relentlessly shaped by the violence they have suffered that they isolate themselves from each other, unable to talk about it. In this sense, the film is also an appeal to communication, the need to talk, to call a spade a spade and not to hide from violence and threat, but to look outward to seek help, the only way to break this vicious circle.

The diver inside – Der Taucher

THE DIVER INSIDE is in every respect a film about our psyche, about our lies, our silence, our fear and brutality, but also about our power to resist and our greatest desire: to be able to love for real and to experience love.

Günter Schwaiger