The first pick was Bilder (M)Einer Mutter/Imágenes de mi/una madre, a memoir film about the sacrifices made by a German woman in the late 20th century for her family. The filmmaker was there to talk a little about the film afterwards, and there were a few Germans in the audience, so I guess everything is back to normal. The film starts about when her parents started their relationship and when her father started to film her mother on Super 8. They were from small-town Bavaria and her mother's parents were on the conservative side, so her mother was not very happy at home. The family wasn't well-off, and two children had to sleep in the living room. With no privacy, the (future) mother never felt like she could develop into her own person in her house, and her parents certainly didn't encourage it. When she started to go out with her children's father, she wrote in her diary about how much she loved him and enjoyed their time together, but there is also a sense that she saw a relationship as an escape from her traditional family. The filmmaker says the last time she smiled on film was shortly before the filmmaker's birth, but even then it seems that she was unsatisfied with her married life. In her diary she writes about being unhappy with everything she tries, studies, hobbies, jobs, although once she has children she doesn't have a lot of job opportunities. The filmmaker's father says when she interviews him that he gladly paid for courses and took care of the children when his wife was in class, but nothing was ever enough. The filmmaker suggests that her mother might have wanted to have a professional life and asks if her father would have chosen to have only hobbies in her place. The father says, vehemently, that if he had had to make the choice he wouldn't have had children, but he had been the one who was expecting to have children in the marriage. At first I thought the mother had gotten sick of everything and abandoned the family, but it turns out she was diagnosed with cancer in the '80s and finally died of it in 1993. Interspersed with the family story are snippets of feminist politics moving forward in Germany from the '50s to the '70s, underlining the changes that were happening in society, and the hope that people should have had in those times. And yet, so many remained hopeless, without knowing why, like her mother. In the Q&A afterwards, the filmmaker said she and her family had worked through their feelings of guilt before she even started on the project, but people working with her did have some quite negative emotions come up. She also mentioned that it wasn't until they were finishing with editing that she realized she had been trying to bring her mother back to life. Although the story actually leaves a lot of unanswered questions about the mother, it is a reflection of people living through a certain era, and the filmmaker said herself that it was only a story, not the story.
Second, I chose Je Suis Karl, which to my surprise was produced by Netflix and in fact still available to watch on the platform. I don't have Netflix, so biggie that I bought a ticket for the festival. I was expecting a story of a somewhat confused young woman who gets suckered into far-right ideology without any trigger, but that's not the story at all. We begin with a couple who turn out to be the protagonist's parents smuggling a Syrian refugee from Hungary (I think) into Germany. A few years later they are living their normal lives in Berlin when a package arrives for a neighbor and the husband takes it into their apartment as a favor to her, since she's 80 something years old. The package turns out to be a bomb which explodes, blows up a good chunk of the building and kills a dozen or so people, including the wife and two young sons of the man who accepted the package. Everyone assumes immediately that it is an Islamic terror attack, although we never see any actual reasoning behind this, and the man's daughter, our main character, has a lot of trouble accepting what has happened. She also gets hounded by the press, which does her mental health no favors. She gets rescued from a couple of reporters by a nice-looking young man who seems sympathetic to her and her situation and invites her to a youth conference in Prague, where the future of Europe will be discussed and "saved". She hesitates, but in the end she goes, without telling her father anything. It turns out the conference is a gathering of right wingers, strategizing to take over as much public space with populist slogans as possible. They even coopt a number of feminist talking points by giving them a heavily xenophobic twist, as if the only men who don't respect women are non-Europeans. After the conference, where the main character has become close to her savior, the titular Karl, they travel to Strasbourg to offer support to a far-right candidate in upcoming elections. The top of the group have decided that they need a big event to kick off a sort of revolution, a call to action for all of their followers across the continent, and that event is a murder. More of a suicide really, although another person will pull the trigger, but they decide that Karl will be "assassinated" after giving a moving speech in favor of this French politician, but it will be his own comrades who do the deed. Total false flag - just like the package bomb, which was delivered by Karl in disguise to stimulate anti-immigrant feeling in Berlin. All goes according to plan for them, the speeches, the murder, the ensuing riots. The main character's father has come to Strasbourg to find her, with the refugee he smuggled years before, who he sought out after the bombing. It isn't clear whether he thought this man might have information about the bomb, or if he is just afraid that his old friend might be having trouble with all the growing anti-foreigner sentiment. As violence explodes all around them in the city, and others as we see on the news, they hide in the sewers, planning to escape, although we don't know where they can go safely now.
The last film for this year was Bornehomer Straße, the story of the first border control to open after the East German government declared free travel for its citizens. The guards hear the announcement on the TV one night and are confused, thinking it can't be a serious change in policy, and their direct supervisors give them no guidance. People show up at the gate, expecting to be allowed to cross, and are told to bring visas as usual or to go home. The crowd grows bigger and more unruly and the guards get more and more nervous. Finally, the head of the control point decides to release some pressure by letting people cross, but the trouble-makers won't be allowed back in, although nobody informs them, of course. When the first people are told they can't re-enter East Berlin, there are more protests and pleading, which the head guard finally gives in to, allowing people to come back without any problems. In the end, he just opens the gate and lets people cross with out any sorting or marking of good or bad on their passports, something that almost seems like treason to his colleagues. So strange a choice is it, that when he returns home and tells his wife about his night at work, she takes it as a joke. I did not know this story before seeing the movie, and while there were some funny moments, like the dog "infiltrating" the DDR, it didn't seem to be the comedy that it was described as. It has the same director as Je Suis Karl in fact, so maybe we should have expected a little bit of misdirection.
One thing I noticed this year was the amount of errors in the subtitles. It's not too weird to see things that don't seem to be exactly what the actors are saying, due to space and time concerns, but these were straight up mistakes. You don't excuse changing "the 20th century" to "8 o'clock" with any bullshit about formatting needs.
And now the dessert beer - Berliner Kindl Himbeer. If the Waldmeister looked like a St. Patrick's treat, raspberry looks like Valentine's. It has the same aroma as Mort Subité, very fruity but a little bit sharp and with warning of syrup. It's much more delicate than cherry and raspberry Belgian beers actually, with more of a hint of fruit over a mouthful of...very mildly sour candy. There is a little bit of that candy feel that was in the Waldmeister, but not quite as much. It's actually a bit lighter in feel. I'm finding the raspberry to be less sticky and more refreshing than the Waldmeister, which is not how I expected it to go, but I'm happy with the experience.
