Fredo Wulf

Ilja Richter, showmaster of the cult programme Disco on ZDF until 1982, was considered the darling of the nation. During his television career, no one suspected that Ilja was the son of a persecuted communist resistance fighter who survived years of imprisonment in concentration camps: Georg Richter. The film accompanies Ilja Richter on his search for clues. The story of his father as a concentration camp inmate is revealed in fragments and is representative of the story of many prisoners.

Ten years ago, young Syrian Alayham fled civil war, and the threat of being drafted, for Germany. There, he became one of the first refugees in Eckernförde – there were six of them at the time, he later remembers. Quickly learning German, he got politically involved in refugee projects, and spoke publicly about his experiences. A move to Jena for university followed: a new everyday life with exam stress, living in a shared flat, a relationship. It was during his studies that he finally felt that he was no longer being reduced to his experience as a refugee: he belonged. Alayham found his feet, as much as possible in a foreign country. But when is “arriving” truly over? Over a period of ten years, documentary filmmaker Fredo Wulf accompanied Alayham on his journey from Schleswig-Holstein via Jena to Heidelberg, where he has lived since getting his medical license.