Steffen Reck

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.