Gamma Bak

Julia is a young transgender woman who left her home country of Lithuania. Now living in Germany, she walks the streets of Berlin, working as a prostitute to survive. This documentary revisits Julia over a ten-year period of her life.

The Engelbecken is not just a normal place between the Berlin districts of Kreuzberg and Mitte, but also symbolic, a kind of metaphor: for the Wall that runs through the whole of Berlin and the deadly landscape that surrounds it, the death strip. It is a place of division, of death, of limitation and confinement. In their essay film, Gamma Bak and Steffen Reck look at the oppositional subculture in Prenzlauer Berg/East Berlin.

Die selbst betroffene Autorin und Regisseurin Gamma Bak hat es zum ersten Mal überhaupt gewagt, über die diversen Stadien ihrer Krankheit einen autobiografischen Film zu drehen. Entstanden ist ein extrem intimes und faszinierendes Selbstporträt, das nicht nur einen Einstieg in das komplexe Thema bietet, sondern auch einen direkten Einblick in das Ringen mit der Diagnose Psychose und der damit verbundenen Stigmatisierung erlaubt.

"My father is Hungarian and has been living in Canada with his wife Polly for over twenty years. In 1990, he bought an apartment in Budapest. Work on this film began with the question of the feasibility of returning from West to East. The participants are our family and my father's friends. Some, like him, went to the West in 1956, while others remained in Hungary after the revolution. "East... West... Home's Best" deals with Central European life stories, belonging, rootlessness, homesickness, and dreams in the context of my personal respect for my own family and friends."