This ambitious second feature braids together the lives of four generations of girls across the tumult and violence of 20th century Germany.
On the river Elbe between Berlin and Hamburg, a family farm sits in a region affected by both world wars and Cold War divisions between East and West Germany. We home in on Alma in the early 20th century, Erika in the 1940s, Angelika in the 1980s, and Lenka in the present. As time moves both forwards and backwards, each faces her own fate. It’s a sombre, beautifully crafted study of Germany’s national trauma, the effects of violent patriarchy and the haunting emotional inheritance of successive conflicts for young women and girls.
