A young girl in her Sunday best picks flowers at the edge of the forest. A young man wearing a fashionable Manchester United jacket rides a moped into the village. And the filmmaker, in jeans, strides through town at a lively pace. Those three figures can be interpreted as the various stages of the director’s life. She speaks off camera, talking about her childhood home, now standing abandoned on the village main street, “windows broken, doors hanging open”. The two young protagonists enter secretly and poke around in the rubble, finding old magazines, postcards, photographs, clothing, and shoes. The narrator talks about her dead relatives – an aunt, her mother, her father, who died at the front, her grandmother, who ran a small store in the house, and her grandfather, who refused to support Hitler, so was labelled a misfit and marginalised … Recha Jungmann traced the tracks of her childhood, which she called full of “fears and discord”. In this cinematic tale, memories of her family come alive, “I look for them. And I can’t reach them. Something hurts”.
by Recha Jungmann
with Simone Maul, Anja Burak, Hermann Schäfer, Anni Schäfer, Walter Mopser, Franz Hartmann, Joseph Schäfer, Recha Jungmann, und Einwohner des Dorfes Welkers/Rhön
Federal Republic of Germany 1980 German 74’ Colour

With

  • Simone Maul
  • Anja Burak
  • Hermann Schäfer
  • Anni Schäfer
  • Walter Mopser
  • Franz Hartmann
  • Joseph Schäfer
  • Recha Jungmann
  • und Einwohner des Dorfes Welkers/Rhön

Crew

Written and Directed by Recha Jungmann
Cinematography Rüdiger Laske, Marian Czura
Editing Ilona Grundmann, Esther Dayan
Music Frank Wolff
Sound Margit Eschenbach, Peter Klemens, Gerhard Waal
Assistant Director Kerstin Räder
Producers Lothar Spree, Recha Jungmann

Additional information

DCP: DFF - Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main