Geranien

Actor Nina travels to her home town in Germany’s Ruhr region for her grandmother’s funeral and discovers that her childhood home has remained virtually unchanged. The canary still chirps in the living room, her mother still sits in the kitchen pitting kilos of plums from the garden, and her father still occasionally indulges in a whisky from the “bottom shelf next to the digestif glasses”. But when the date for the funeral is postponed, tensions flare up again between the pragmatic mother and her cosmopolitan daughter who now lives in a large European city and considers the offer of a role in German TV soap Traumschiff (Dreamboat) to be beneath her. And kindly old grandma is no longer there to cushion such conflicts.
Directed with gentle humour, DFFB graduate Tanja Egen’s perceptive feature debut is much more than just a tale of such classic family problems as repressed emotions, things that remain unspoken and a growing sense of distance. Rich in detail, Geranien is an affectionate observation of the complex relationships that exist between daughters and mothers – no matter how old a daughter and a mother may be. Loss, it seems, is a universal feeling.