SUMMARY

An old father and a son who neither can be called young anymore share the wounds of their relationship, wounds they otherwise keep quiet about. Their wounds stem from their experiences of totalitarianism in Communist East Germany; the father as a writer and the son as a photographer. What reconciliation is possible between them when state violence has penetrated the very centre of a family?

SYNOPSIS

Like a modern epic, the question of submission or resistance runs through eight decades of a family life right up to the present day.

The grandmother (Margarete Neumann), a loyal supporter of the “Third Reich” in her youth, becomes a celebrated young author in the newly founded GDR. Her son (Gert Neumann), also a writer, listens sensitively to the ambiguity of language, the freedom of which he fights for with fierce determination. In the next and last generation, his 20 year old photographer son (Aram Radomski) documents the last years of this country whose future he never believed in. His videos of the mass protests before the fall of the wall in 1989 are broadcast on television stations around the world.

SUMMARY

An old father and a son who neither can be called young anymore share the wounds of their relationship, wounds they otherwise keep quiet about. Their wounds stem from their experiences of totalitarianism in Communist East Germany; the father as a writer and the son as a photographer. What reconciliation is possible between them when state violence has penetrated the very centre of a family?

SYNOPSIS

Like a modern epic, the question of submission or resistance runs through eight decades of a family life right up to the present day.

The grandmother (Margarete Neumann), a loyal supporter of the “Third Reich” in her youth, becomes a celebrated young author in the newly founded GDR. Her son (Gert Neumann), also a writer, listens sensitively to the ambiguity of language, the freedom of which he fights for with fierce determination. In the next and last generation, his 20 year old photographer son (Aram Radomski) documents the last years of this country whose future he never believed in. His videos of the mass protests before the fall of the wall in 1989 are broadcast on television stations around the world.

Encounters between the living writer father and his son tell how deeply their artistic decisions in a repressive state system divided the family to this day and lead to hurt and speechlessness across three generations.

As a film-within-a-film montage, director Götz Schauder alternately shows previously shot interview scenes to his two protagonists. The first confrontation takes place from a distance. Through an intervening form of cinéma vérité, Aram and his father are offered the opportunity to perceive each other in a new way. They are then challenged to actually approach each other in front of the camera.

With cinematic images for the big screen (Marcus Winterbauer), an archive of unique photo and video recordings of a country in decline from the perspective of a rebellious twenty-year-old (Aram Radomski) as well as a huge family treasure of private filming, correspondence and diary notes, the film will provide an intimate insight into the inner life of an East German family and the former communist state as a whole.