The living proof tells the story of a woman in her mid-40s who feels an increasing alienation - from her surroundings, her family and from herself. Withdrawn into the attic of her house, she looks out over the village to which she once moved full of hope. In an attempt to reunderstand the world around her and her position in it, she begins a 'scientific investigation of the collective conscious and unconscious of the place'. Accompanied by the conscientious village chronicler, the esoteric pastor and two outsiders, she embarks on a journey into the depths of the remote village. The boundaries between the observer and the observed are blurred. The deeper she delves into the mechanisms of the village, the clearer it becomes that her research is not only focused on the place, but also on her own nature - and on human nature in general. It itself becomes a 'porous place' through which long-suppressed ghosts push to the surface. What begins as a rational analysis becomes increasingly destabilized - because the structures it seeks to unravel grasp itself. The living proof is a reflection on social dilemmas and the permeability of the boundaries between inside and outside, individual and collective. Do we shape the world, or does it shape us? Or is that a contradiction at all? Biography Lola Randl, born in Munich in 1980, works as a screenwriter and director for cinema and television. Most recently, the television series Landschwärmer (2014) and the feature film Von Bienen und Blumen (2019) were made. With her novel The Great Garden, she was nominated for the German Book Prize 2019. Randl lives in a small town in the Uckermark region of Brandenburg.