Through the testimony of an unseen female voice, Anna, the film weaves together the story of her mother, a German woman named Lene, from the Second World War through the postwar years. Even before Anna is born, she exists in the form of her parents’ confessions to one another, insistently posing them unanswerable questions. As the war breaks out, her father Hans is called to the front, and Lene and Anna are forced to leave Berlin, wandering through forests and ruins. Their reunions with Hans grow ever more difficult; each time he returns from the war, he brings with him a strange and desperate violence.
Helma Sanders-Brahms (1940–2014) was a landmark figure of New German Cinema whose output ranged remarkably widely: from documentary to fiction, from historical drama to contemporary life, from tragedy to comedy, and from autobiographical women’s stories to the life and writing of the poet Heinrich von Kleist. She was able not only to reconstruct a life from the singularity of her subject, but also to draw frequently on literary and artistic material—classical drama, novels, poetry, fairy tales—to infuse her films with a dense language and a writerly gesture.
