»In all my work, I’m interested in the ongoing present, in the atmosphere and texture of everyday life. … For Return, I felt that it was most interesting to narrate the blunt textures of how a crisis feels when it’s played out in the everyday. … Return is not a political argument, or at least it is not one in the pro-and-con polemical style that dominates American political conversation. The film doesn’t make moral judgments about war or the homeland – it walks a line that makes those judgments difficult, or at least beside the point. Instead it demands empathetic engagement with a woman in an extreme state of being, grounded in a very particular community, place and time.
– Liza Johnson

Back from a military tour of duty, Kelli can’t wait to rejoin her old life in the Rust Belt town she’s always known. She’s ready to experience the carpet under her bare feet, the smell of her baby’s head, her working on the forklift truck. But the life she left behind has become stale to her. Daily life is banal, yet difficult to cope with as well. Nowhere does she see any signs of the war she has been fighting in, and whether it made any sense where she was, and why. She finds that her friends are preoccupied with trifles. Her children need more focused attention than she can give, and her husband Mike – if he wants anything at all – wants his old wife back. Kelli risks becoming an outsider and struggles to find a way forward.
This is the German premiere of Return.