Bilder (m)einer Mutter (Life On Tape)

Film program, DE 2021, 79 min., dt. OV + engl. UT

By: Melanie Lischker

We are happy to welcome director Melanie Lischker at the Pornfilmfestival.

One thematic focus in this year’s festival are the big secrets and unspoken truths between parents and their children, Under the title„Family Constellations“ the festival shows two documentaries (“Anima – Die Kleider meines Vaters” is screened directly after “Bilder (m)einer Mutter”) and the fictional “Grand Jeté”.

In her directing debut, Melanie Lischker goes in search for traces of her mother who died when she and her brother were teenagers and who has been captured on countless home videos her father took. With the help of the family archive and her mother’s diaries, she is telling a disturbing post-war biography. She achieves a moving family constellation that gives an insight into West-German realities from the 1950s until the 1990s, from a strict catholic upbringing via a seemingly emancipated housewife-existence to the first and last relative freedom in a cancer clinic shortly before her death. The filmmaker combines the thoughts and dreams of her mother with the political reality of women in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the personal story becomes exemplary for many women who were torn between their own ambitions and the advancing feminism, while financial dependency on their husbands and care for their families kept them tied to their homes. The story of her mother reflects that of many women of her generation who were broken between their dreams and the reality.

Molly Shanker

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