Call me Paris

But just as Paris is being celebrated as the inventor of the selfie, her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon reveals he can offer a quite different kind of picture of the party girl: he publishes her private sex tape under the title »1 Night in Paris«. This film becomes the highest selling porn film of the noughties. Paris tries in vain to sue for the rights to her own image.


Bergisch Gladbach, 2004: Julia, a young blonde girl, has just arrived in the city, and due to her resemblance to the American It girl, is immediately given the nickname »Paris« at school. She soon finds herself in her own version of the »1 Night in Paris« video. But how did she end up there? For a long time, she blocks out the memory of this night. Until, in 2024, she reads Paris Hilton’s memoirs. And the real Paris writes the following words about her sex tape: »It felt like being electronically raped«.


In search of the right to her own image, and ultimately also for a part of herself, Julia tries to shed light on what can have actually happened in the past:

• how did she become »Paris«?
  
• Where is her tape?
  
• And if it is nothing more than a copy of an original, who is the girl that can be seen in the video? Who is this person behind the persona?
  

In »Call me Paris«, Yana Eva Thönnes follows the two doppelgangers through the prism of traumatic memory, and dissects the context for both these real-life cases: the noughties as the last unashamedly misogynistic decade, which saw the rapid expansion of an all-encompassing internet.


Yana Eva Thönnes is a director, playwright and performer. In 2015, she founded the performance group THE AGENCY together with Magdalena Emmerig, Rahel Spöhrer and Belle Santos. In the fall of 2023, she staged »In Memory of Doris Bither« at the Schaubühne studio.