Jeanine Meerapfel

Two life stories. That of Malou, a French woman, married to a German Jew, a refugee stranded in South America: a picture of the pre-war generation reflected in the unusual destiny of an individual woman. And that of Hannah, an alert, independent, modern woman, seeking after freedom and her own identity, and trying in present-day Berlin to save her shaky marriage.

It’s the late 1950s, and in an affluent and quietly respectable part of Buenos Aires, young Sulamit Löwenstein strikes up a friendship with her next-door neighbour Friedrich over the whereabouts of her family dog. She is the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants to Argentina, he is the son of a senior SS officer, a tragic political legacy from whose shadow both characters struggle to escape over the next three decades. Following the teenaged Friedrich to Germany, Sulamit finds him caught up in the radical politics of late-1960s student life; and she’s forced to make important decisions about her attitude to her homeland when Friedrich returns to Argentina to join the fight against the military junta.

A young father takes his son on a journey away from Buenos Aires and through the strange and wondrous world of rural South America. The man is unemployed and separated from the boy's mother. The trip teaches the man to rediscover both the world outside urban Argentina, and also to rediscover his son.

A widow reminisces on her life after returning to her family home in Greece.

"Had it not been for Hitler, I would have been born a German-Jewish child, more German than Jewish, in a small village in the South of Germany. But as it happened, I was born in Argentina, my mothertongue is Spanish. I came to Germany 17 years ago." It is here, where author and director Jeanine Meerapfel starts searching for her own Jewish identity, being confronted time and time again with Federal Republic reality.

Citizens of East Germany talk about their experiences and feelings in the face of upcoming elections that will lead to reunification with the West. The past is tinged with regret, frustration and anger, while the future is uncertain.

Between 1976 and 1982 thousands of citizens were kidnapped, tortured and killed in Argentina. How do Argentinians cope with this tragedy? How do they elaborate their recent past?

In 1970, Melek Tez came to Berlin as a young worker from Turkey. A confident woman, she first countered racist resentments and remarks with irony and wit. Jokingly, she even referred to herself as a "Kümmeltürkin", a derogatory German term for Turkish migrants. Yet after fourteen humiliating years, her fighting spirit has given way to resignation: Melek Tez is returning to Turkey. Blending documentary, interviews and re-enacted scenes, director Jeanine Meerapfel chronicles Melek Tez' life experience.