Director: Mascha Schilinski

Stars: Hanna Heckt, Lea Drinda, Claudia  Geisler-Bading, Filip Schnack, Lena Urzendowsky, Laeni Geiseler, Luise Heyer, Lucas Prisor

German director and co-writer Mascha Schilinski's second feature is an elegantly constructed but demanding profile of young German women over four generations. In 1910, seven-year-old Alma (Heckt) lives on a farm in the Altmark region, where she observes the world of adults, its acts of brutality and secrets. Teenage sisters Erika and Irm (Drinda and Bading) live on the same farm in the 1940s with their brother, who oversees the running, and their bedridden amputee Uncle Fritz (Schnack). In the 1980s, Irm is now married with her husband and a teenage daughter Angelika (Urzendowsky), who after witnessing her mother being humiliated at village gatherings, begins to rebel. Jump to present day where Christa (Heyer) and her husband Hannes (Prisor) live on the renovated farm with their two children. The elder child befriends a confident village girl with a connection to earlier characters.This is a darkly lyrical and dense study of the condition of female trauma over the decades, which nods to Bergman, Terence Davies, and the horror genre, with Schilinski deftly juggling the chronology and underlining her themes via recurring motifs and situations. Fabian Gamper’s brown-hued murky cinematography framed in boxy aspect ratio, emphasises the claustrophobic feel, so, despite the moments of humour and warmth, this proves a challenging watch over the two-and-a-half hour running time.

David Willoughby

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