Everything comes to an end, even pandemics. This one is still hanging around, though, and it showed in the German Film Festival this year - few people in the audience, and hardly any Germans, if any at all. Also fewer films than last year, but more than enough for the three movie pass, and this was the third movie. Walchensee Forever is a biopic of a family primarily consisting of women and their experiences over the 20th century. At first I thought they had some very good effects with films of the family in the '40s and '50s, especially the interview style film, but it seems the family has had interest and talent in photography and art since the grandfather married the grandmother. He was an art student and eventually became a photographer in Munich, while her parents had a cafe/inn on the Walchensee which she carried on with all her life. The filmmaker's mother says her mother only worked in the cafe out of a sense of duty to her parents, who were very happy with their profession, and in a short clip the filmmaker took after mother and grandmother argue about running the cafe, the grandmother says she would enjoy being young at the end of the 20th century instead of the beginning. She could be a computer geek, she says. A lot of the film focuses on the mother's younger sister, who killed herself after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. The two had been a duo performing traditional Bavarian music in the 60's and had fallen into a lot of the other cultural trappings of the time, including drugs and Indian spirituality. The mother met the filmmaker's at a peace conference in Mexico City after her sister's death, and went to live with him in San Francisco. The films of them together during her pregnancy are very of the time, being naked in nature, living in a sort of half-wild area and having a homebirth. Eventually the mother goes back to Walchensee to help her mother with the cafe, the relationship with the filmmaker's father having run its course basically as soon as she was born. The filmmaker seems to be on a quest to define home and belonging with the interviews. At the end she has her own child and goes with her mother to San Francisco to visit her father, giving the impression of their acceptance of the wheel of life turning, since the grandmother had passed away a while before at age 104.
I have another Berliner Weisse today, although the movie doesn't take place in or near Berlin at all. Still a German style, dammit! And it's not a German beer again, I admit, but it's Spanish and it's good to support local industry. Maglia Rosa, with raspberries, comes from Cierzo, and it was a hard decision between that and some nice black beers. They weren't as German, though. La Buena Cerveza is packing up to move to a new location, so I have an excuse to go back for one or two stouts next month.
Much rosier than the strawberry weisse, with a party pink head of foam that quickly vanishes. It gives the visual impression of a red berry soda. It smells more like Mort Subité than Fanta, though, to my relief. While there is a touch of sweetness and raspberry pokes here and there, the beer is definitely not sweet overall. Now it's more like that strawberry one! It's especially tangy at the back of the tongue, giving a little kick on its way down. It has a champagne-like dryness that keeps it from any kind of fruit beer sticky, although I don't tend to find dry drinks especially refreshing.
Supplier: La Buena Cerveza
Price: €5.55
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