Schanelec’s sophomore feature is a coming-of-age story crafted with her signature sensitivity, absence of sentimentality, and delicate use of cinematic form to convey the pains of becoming. Quiet teenager Mimmi (Sophie Aigner) lives in Berlin with her single mother, but while on a school trip to Paris she falls in love and becomes pregnant, the already complicated path from childhood to adulthood growing ever more obscure. Increasingly drawing upon ellipsis and stylistic austerity to achieve a powerful rawness of feeling, Places in Cities marks a formative transitional point for Schanelec, rendering a familiar genre all the more moving through the delicacy of her compositions and the rhythmic force of her editing.