German teenager Franny (newcomer Naomi Cosma) arrives in New Mexico to spend the 2001-02 academic year at a high school in Las Cruces, living with a local family, just before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in writer-director Katharina Rivilis’ wispy but engaging debut feature.

Even if you didn’t know that this was inspired by Rivilis’ own teenage experience as an exchange student back in the day you would probably guess from the way nothing really happens, apart from friends getting made, places being seen and hearts being negligibly fractured. Nevertheless, as befits a film partly backed by Wim Wenders’ Road Movies, this deploys an eclectic soundtrack and lashings of backlighting and magic hour cinematography to help capture the uncanny feeling of being a European stranger in a strange land of enchantment out west. Rivilis also coaxes confident, naturalistic performances from her non-professional cast, who largely improvised their dialogue, making this a good fit for festivals with young audiences.  

Although Franny doesn’t say much, she’s all eyes and ears, observing closely everything from the moment she touches down in Albuquerque to meet her host family. But Franny is no naïf, and having grown up in East Germany until the Wall came down as well as possessing a natural intelligence and street smarts, she quickly picks up that things aren’t quite right in the home of the Garcias, her host family. While the parents, Tony and Eve Garcia seem nice at first, Franny quickly works out that they’re less open to cultural exchange than one would expect. Plus, the fact that they’ve taken in foster child Patty has less to do with kindness than avarice since they get an income for it from social services. They even leave Franny, Patty and their daughter Robin in the car one afternoon so they can go inside a casino for hours.

After Franny works out that Eve seems to be confiscating some of her possessions, maybe to sell them, and they fight over who she’s making friends with, Franny goes to live with another family. The mother this time works at Franny’s high school and they seem to have more money judging by the presence of a pool in the backyard. Best of all, they keep Franny on a very long leash and sort of disappear from the movie soon after this as Franny, when not in school, spends more and more time with other teens.

Her new friends include Sam (Bianca Dumais), a rock-chick type who’s the same age as Franny and who has developed a reputation for promiscuity around town that doesn’t seem deserved. (It’s hinted that she may be the victim of abuse.) Franny quickly develops a friendship circle that includes kids who like to party but seem basically pretty nice, while she also sometimes hangs out with straighter but sweet fellow German exchange student Ida (Rebecca Schulz, who appeared in one of Rivilis’ shorts).

But the most exciting new relationship turns out to be with Elliot (David Flores), a handsome boy with hair and cheekbones like 1990s-vintage Johnny Depp, who sings in a band and works at a drive-up diner where he serves customers while wearing roller skates. The fact that the adults don’t approve of him because he reportedly takes drugs makes him all the more attractive to Franny. After a romantic trip to the white sands of the desert and swoony kisses (filmed by a constantly circling camera, very pop video), Franny is thoroughly smitten and soon starts moping when he fails to call her back. He’s a teenage boy, afraid of commitment, and completely oblivious to the fact that she’s probably the most interesting person he’s ever going to meet.

As the months pass, much less noticeably thanks to the Southwest weather than they would back in Franny’s hometown of Brandenburg, she grows accustomed to the strange ways and customs of small-town American life, which at this juncture is suffused with the patriotism that gripped the country in the wake of the attacks. Rivilis manages to get across how weird it all is to her protagonist/stand-in without being patronizing about “dumb” Americans barely aware of what’s going on in the next county over, let alone Europe and the Middle East. A scene in a high-school civics class where students debate retaliatory invasions abroad, half of them paying attention and the other half goofing off, suggests what an uphill battle it is for teachers to break through the apathy and boredom — and this was before social media.

In fact, the film effectively becomes a nostalgic glimpse at a teenage way of life that’s almost disappeared, when kids talked to each other and hung out IRL much more and didn’t spend every waking minute with eyes glued to screens. Those were the days.