It is Christmas in Dresden, 1990. The steady camera movements reveal the dark brown walls whose apparent fragility seems to hint that they might soon succumb to the weight of history. The city on the Elbe in the cold, snowy winter right after the Berlin Wall came down forms the backdrop for the German reunification story. It\u2019s an elaborate family saga about lifelong lies, betrayal, love, and dreams played out in the context of the ever-present theme in St\u00f6ckl\u2019s work: the question of the ability or inability to put up resistance, often expressed solely in people\u2019s heads.<\/p>\n
Nothing is simple in this film, especially not its characters. After 40 years in West Germany, Ilse\u2019s sister Katharina returns to her native Dresden to meet up again with her old flame, Alf. She\u2019s hard-working and tough, self-sacrificing and nevertheless unfair. Katharina\u2019s brother Rudolf accompanies her and looks after his nephew Karl, who is in a wheelchair, and whose daughter Sophie, who grew up in Cologne, just can\u2019t connect with Alf\u2019s grandchildren, raised in the GDR. Alf\u2019s dream of a just socialist system has long since faded away. But what\u2019s going to become of the love that Katharina still feels for him after all these years \u2013 even though he only ever had eyes for her sister Ilse? Ilse, the symbol of freedom and resistance, who only exists in other people\u2019s dreams and memories, and who \u2013 if she is to be embodied in Ula St\u00f6ckl\u2019s idiosyncratic film by Grischa Huber \u2013 we see as at times thoughtful, other times laughing, and who always sings the slightly different, old song \u00bbLied der Deutschen\u00ab, Germany\u2019s national anthem.<\/p>\n
Guest: Ula St\u00f6ckl<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14876,"template":"","movie_year":[156],"movie_genre":[80],"movie_cat":[212],"festival":[183],"class_list":["post-14894","movie","type-movie","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","movie_year-156","movie_genre-feature-film-en","movie_cat-ifff-revisited-en-2022","festival-2022-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n