Heimkino zehn

It's coming time to finish the German Film Festival for this year, and there's one more documentary to go.  I'm kind of digging the documentaries that I've been able to see this year, but to be honest, I probably wouldn't seek out the docs next year if I had to choose.  I'm just too invested in my fictional or "based on actual events" movies.  This documentary goes by the name Lost in Face.  It's a series of interviews with a woman who has suffered prosopagnosia or face blindness her whole life.  She explains that she has never been able to recognize her face in the mirror, but she knows her clothes and her house, so the person in the mirror must be her.  She can't recognize anybody she's ever known by their face, instead she can identify their gait, posture, or general attitude, and identifies people in family photographs by how they face the camera.  She is something of an artist now, creating semi-cubist works because of her inability to retain details of faces.  They come out with several eyes or no really identifiable eye, lines that could be a mouth or not, and yet the hairstyles are often quite exact.  "Charlotte" did not give her real name at first, being suspicious of how the interviews could develop, but later developed something of a rapport with the interviewer.  He takes her to a hospital for a brain scan, to see if there's a physical problem that can explain her condition, but in the scans the part of her brain that is supposed to process faces appears to be perfectly normal.  The malfunction is at a smaller level of detail than the machine can detect.  The interviews are interspersed with animations of her brainspace, with her "self" cutting the strings of other faces and people and letting them fall into the abyss of nothingness.  She talks about finding friends through her horses, which are kept at a fairly snooty stable, although she doesn't pay any attention to the other people who board there.  A young girl showed up one day with no horse to ride and was just watching the others, so Charlotte, riding without tack or "proper" riding habit, asked her if she wanted to ride Charlotte's horse. They became close friends, and Charlotte was worried about how to handle a long distance friendship when the girl eventually moved to Australia.  Charlotte also talks about her birth mother, who had been very young, perhaps a teenager, when she was born, and had given her up for adoption.  Charlotte's adoptive parents allowed her birth mother to come around as an "aunt", although eventually she managed to get ahold of her birth certificate and see who her birth mother was.  I think no father was actually listed on the certificate.  They continued their friendship until her birth mother's death.  The interviewer spends some time in the beginning encouraging Charlotte to try new ways of knowing the forms of faces but at first she rebuffs him.  At the end, though, she tries to use touch to "see" the features of a face to draw it.  She makes a portrait of him and gives it to him as a present.

Weihenstephaner, is that what I'm left with?  Don't get me wrong, it's a good beer, but it's so normal for something to go with such a surreal kind of story.  It's Vitus, the weizenbock, so at least there's a certain weight to it to help you digest the strangeness of the film.  It's a pretty typical German beer, with the touches of grain in the aroma and flavor, but also some good shades of fruit coming in.  Nothing too exotic, apple and banana for the most part, but it's a playful sort of beer, perky and bright after a story showing somebody living a life that we can only comprehend in the most basic way, understanding her words but not her reality.