Breathing (German: Atmen) is a 2011 Austrian art house drama film written and directed by Karl Markovics.

[1] The film concerns a 19-year-old inmate in a detention facility for juveniles, with a pending application for parole, who is challenged to reconsider his identity by a trial work-release job at a morgue.

Starring Thomas Schubert, Karin Lischka and Gerhard Liebmann, it was screened at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

The first scene introduces Roman Kogler as he is interviewing for a job in a metal-working factory, and he is lying about his welding skills to the foreman.

Returned to prison, we see Kogler disrobe and endure the ritualized strip search, which is apparently required at each re-entrance, administered with curt, routine efficiency by a uniformed officer and his assistant.

After a chance encounter on the job with the naked corpse of a young woman who shares his surname, Roman seems to panic at the idea that this might be his mother, dead.

She also confesses to him that the real reason that she gave Roman up was that, when he was a baby, she tried to suffocate him by placing a pillow over his face, to stop his crying.