Annika Mayer

A story about male hubris, repressed feelings, unconscious depression and the hard struggle for success in a capitalist world where fragility has no place.

In a near-future Romania, young Ozana (Silvana Mihai) is chosen to work as a food taster for the leader of forces occupying her country. The sole rule for her to follow is that she must never look this man in the eye.

A story slowly reveals itself: a spattering of campfires and makeshift tents is actually a caravan heading to the US border in search of safety and a new life. Silent images and fragments of touching conversations calmly direct the viewer’s attention to individual destinies. What seems so abstract and far away, suddenly becomes close and alive.

Hazira survived Srebrenica. She saw the war, it corroded her life. She has been stuck in a refugee camp in her own country for 29 years, working hard and unceasingly to make ends meet and keep the trauma at bay.

Director Annika Mayer's mother mentioned to her one day that she wanted to dispose of the family's old Super8 film footage. Just in time, Annika is able to save the material from the 1950s and 1960s. The footage shows a model family of the post-war period in the FRG. This irritates her, since she knew about her grandmother's unhappy marriage. Upon closer questioning of her father and grandparents, she realizes the extent of the violence in her grandparents' marriage and her father's childhood.

Old Super 8 films show domestic happiness, the West German economic miracle, an idyllic home, grandmother Rose as a young woman at the centre. They do not show the violence in Rose’s marriage. Or do they?