WITH KEINER LIEBT MICH, German filmmaker Doris Dörrie makes a turn not only to literary, movie, and mythological sources, including the Classical myth Orpheus, for inspiration for her films but also to the principles and practice of Buddhism. In Buddhism Dorrie discovered a more compassionate way of being present in each moment, with each breath, while confronting the myriad challenges of modern life. During the making of the film, her husband, cinematographer Helge Weindler, underwent chemotherapy treatments for liver cancer while another member of the film crew dealt with HIV. Dörrie approached the filmmaking process with special care and consideration and describes in a 1996 interview with Klaus Phillips how these challenges changed the making of the film, stating: “Because we were dealing with this, the shoot was very, very light, and very easy, somehow.” She also notes that “when you get down to serious business, things do become quite light in a different way.”

Buddhist lessons of levity in the midst of dealing with life and death issues informed Dörrie's personal as well as her public life and her subsequent works, marking a distinct shift of focus in her films and a softening of perspective in her work. This turn in Dörrie's work is both Orphic and Buddhist in nature, and characterized by its non-consuming, non-sexual tender gaze and its call for a more engaged and compassionate care for others, especially the more vulnerable citizens in Germany's post-Wende, multicultural society. The turn is seen most clearly in the shape-shifting character of Orfeo del Altamar, played beautifully by Pierre Sanoussi- Bliss. Inspired by both the Classical mythical figure of Orpheus and his modern incarnation in Marcel Camus's 1959 film as Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), a figure who navigates the ritualistic and rhapsodic carnival in Brazil's favelas, Dorrie's Orfeo is markedly other and at the same time very much a typical, modern German in the country's increasingly diverse society. Orfeo del Altamar is also Walter Rattinger, a broke, soon-to-be evicted, exotic, East German, gay drag queen, dying of an unknown disease that appears to be AIDS. He performs for the consumptive pleasure of the self-consumed, heteronormative, white majority culture, including the film's protagonist Fanny Fink (Maria Schrader).