Call me Paris

»Everyone should have fun with my image« (Paris Hilton)

Los Angeles, 2004: Paris Hilton, the heiress to the multi-million-dollar Hilton hotel empire, is on a meteoric rise from It girl to reality TV star. 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«. The film becomes the highest selling porn film of the noughties. Paris tries in vain to sue for the rights to her own image.

 At the same time in Bergisch Gladbach: Julia, a young blonde teenage girl, moves to the city and is immediately given the nickname ‘Paris’ at school due to her resemblance to the American It girl. She soon finds herself in her own version of the ‘1 Night in Paris’ video. She blocks out the memory of this night for a long time. Until, in 2024, she reads in Paris Hilton's memoirs what the real Paris writes about her sex tape: ‘It was like being electronically raped.’

In search of the rights to her own image, she encounters the man who abused her. An act of violence occurs in a Hilton hotel room. Now the man is lying face down on the bed. How could it have come to this? Suddenly, Julia is confronted by the real Paris Hilton, Julia's mother and her friends. Together they try to untangle the threads: How did she become ‘Paris’? Where is her tape? And if she is nothing more than a copy of an original, who is the girl on the tape? Who is the person behind the persona?  

In the form of a memoir, Yana Eva Thönnes follows the two doppelgängers 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. »Call me Paris« premiered at the Biennale di Venezia in 2025.