CN: Thematization of suicide
Blood is thicker than water, they say, and family ties are stronger than any tightrope. But separations are unavoidable, usually very painful, and sometimes absolutely necessary for life. In moving autobiographies, the program focuses on disappearances, ruptures, memories, and new beginnings and sheds light on family constellations in the process of dissolving and redefining themselves. (Linn Löffler)
The filmmaker, who experienced a difficult childhood together with her four sisters, explores the meaning of their first names when their family is on the verge of change and dissolution. Through this quest for answers, the sisters are given the opportunity to share their stories with each other. It helps them to better understand and cope with their existing feelings of love, pain, and anger.
… >>>Images of landscapes, buildings, and people – scenes of everyday life dissolve into individual elements and limbs in order to be reconnected as fragments of spatial structures and gestures. The filmmaker's painted, scratched, and animated photographs of a family album create a new landscape of shapes and light points.
… >>>Just before the launch of artificial moons that will erase the distinction between day and night, a retired couple finds their harbor in the fading darkness of their home. While they try to keep up with the pace of modernity, their daily life is illuminated by the artificial light of screens and colorful LED lights and the impending brightness has long since become a reality.
… >>>Els is in her late-forties, divorced, and in love again. For her, falling in love was not easy: it meant that she had to accept, she has a life even if her twenty-year-old daughter wants to die and has already asked for psychiatric euthanasia which her mother can do nothing about. In the storm of her own emotions, mixed with guilt, anger, fear, and hope, love is what teaches Els to try stepping forward even if it seems impossible.
… >>>My mother, Carol Frieda Herman P. Hirsch, Chaya bas Moshe ve Yehudit, died on June 23, 2022, at home, the way she wanted her last weeks to be. Self-determined, surrounded by majestic trees outside the windows, with birds chirping in the background. With her books in shelves nearby. Even when she lacked the energy to read, she was glad to have those books near her. And she enjoyed the smells of good food, her music, and other simple things as long as it was possible. A tribute.
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