Protagonist Pepperminta (Ewelina Guzik) at the beginning of the film is a 10-year-old girl who lives alone in a rainbow colored villa and holds strawberries as pets.
Together with her hypochondriac friend Werwen (Sven Pippig), her pansexual sister Edna NeinNeinNein Tulip (Sabine Timoteo), and the elderly Leopoldine (Elisabeth Orth), she sets out to free people from their grey and colorless life.
In the course of the film, they roam the Swiss cities of Vienna and Zürich, a restaurant is turned upside down, students are literally painted with bright colors and police officers attacked with fruit.
Rist said about the film, Pepperminta and her sister Edna existed in a space before the Fall of man, "beyond social classes or time references".
[2] Chris Niemeyer, who worked on the screenplay together with Rist, sees the basic idea behind the fairy tale story in Pepperminta in the desire to free the world from fear.
"[1] Geneviève Rossier states on the film portal cineuropa.org: "Rist's feminine universe depicted with extravagance and sensuality is certainly on full show in Pepperminta.
Sylvia Lavin concluded in the magazine Artforum: "This intersection of two seemingly incompatible orders—Rist's uncertain vulnerability and Eisenman's hostile hyperrationality—catalyzed a new spatial economy generated by irreducible moments of experience to which no conventions of value can be attached.
"[11] In a conversation with Richard Julin, Rist placed Pepperminta in a generational line with later video works: In the feature film Pepperminta, the protagonist lives in the space before the fall of man, in her art work Liberty, A Statue For Löndon she has returned to civilization, and in Tyngdkraft, var min vän she overcomes seasons and gravity, and, together with an androgynous person, she flies away from the world.