Etwas tut weh

A young girl in her Sunday best picks flowers at the edge of the forest. A young man wearing a fashionable Manchester United jacket rides a moped into the village. And the filmmaker, in jeans, strides through town at a lively pace. Those three figures can be interpreted as the various stages of the director’s life. She speaks off camera, talking about her childhood home, now standing abandoned on the village main street, “windows broken, doors hanging open”. The two young protagonists enter secretly and poke around in the rubble, finding old magazines, postcards, photographs, clothing, and shoes. The narrator talks about her dead relatives – an aunt, her mother, her father, who died at the front, her grandmother, who ran a small store in the house, and her grandfather, who refused to support Hitler, so was labelled a misfit and marginalised. Recha Jungmann traced the tracks of her childhood, which she called full of “fears and discord”. In this cinematic tale, memories of her family come alive, “I look for them. And I can’t reach them. Something hurts”. (Berlinale)