Hella Wenders

Prominent filmmakers talk about documentaries that have moved, impressed, or had a lasting influence on them.

If children don't learn from an early age that people are different, when will they? The documentary focuses on four children at the inclusive Berg Fidel primary school in Münster. Director Hella Wenders spent three years following David, Jakob, Lucas, and Anita with her camera at school, at home, and in their free time. While the idea of an open school is currently the subject of lively debate, this sensitive portrait film gives the children a voice. They talk about themselves and share their dreams and concerns with us. The viewer is impressed by how naturally they interact with each other and becomes part of a small world that functions in a miraculous way.

Filmmaker Hella Wenders follows four children – David, Jakob, Anita, and Lucas – who attend the inclusive Berg Fidel school in Münster, where students are accepted regardless of physical, mental, or social differences and all kinds of impairments are accommodated. She documents the careers of David, Jakob, and Anita, as well as their former classmate Samira, after they left their old school and transferred to different secondary schools. She shows the different dreams, hopes, worries, fears, and hardships of the four children and young people, but also their academic and personal successes.

In Siculiana, a small Sicilian town full of flaking facades, religiosity is lived out as a matter of course. And of course the figure of Jesus Christ worshipped here is black, and always has been. However, some people cannot get used to their dark-skinned neighbours in the refugee camp. The camera accompanies locals and stranded people along their paths, which often lead to the church, but not necessarily together, and draws a kind of map of the city in black-on-black contrasts.

Gianni’s world is turned upside down when a film director contacts him after finding a series of his childhood slides at a flea market and decides to make a film about them. As his past comes to life on the screen, the boundaries between truth, memory and fiction become increasingly blurred.