Six-year-old Muhi has an infectious laugh and loves to imitate his grandfather, Abu Naim. The boy, who was born the son of a Hamas activist in Gaza, has spent his whole life in an Israeli hospital. He has a rare autoimmune disease. When he was two his hands and feet had to be amputated. In Gaza he would be condemned to die, because healthcare is in a desolate state there. On the other side of the border he can get treatment, but the price is high.

Muhi leads a paradoxical life. The only person allowed to accompany him to Israel was his grandfather. This hospital has been their “home” for six years now, far from their family. Muhi hardly knows his parents and siblings. His father condemns the state that keeps his son alive and wants the boy back in Gaza – whatever the cost. Though Muhi’s sphere of action is doubly limited, he has settled into his life and his optimism and courage make its obstructions seem absurd. And yet the irresolvability of his personal tragedy shines through the surface of every scene in this sensitive film. The end leaves us wondering how this unusual child will be able to continue to go his own way in the future.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

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Golden Dove German Competition;
Nominated for ver.di Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness, Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize, DEFA Sponsoring Prize

Music can trigger the deepest and most secret emotions in us, be a physical, mental or spiritual experience – for the musicians who create it, too. Aspiring singers take private lessons to reach the highest level of classical singing. The film follows three renowned voice and singing teachers and their students over the course of a semester. It is tough physical training, hours of practice, breathing, finding the exactly right positions of tongue and jaws. Because ultimately the magic of extreme emotionality can be produced only on the basis of technical perfection, by pouring ones personality into it, by an interplay of effort and the ability to let go.

Though we learn little about the singers, listening primarily to their voices, we feel the intensity and intimacy that arises between teacher and student in these kinds of private lessons – an atmosphere in which something great, transcendent is being built. The light and usually quiet concrete building of one of the three music academies visited by Itay Marom for his film seems almost like a Zen monastery.

Frederik Lang

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Awarded with the DEFA Sponsoring Prize.

A young Israeli woman moves to Germany. “To the Diaspora!” her horrified parents exclaim, to the place where most of her relatives died in the Holocaust. But as a representative of the third generation, Yael Reuveny insists on her right to move without prejudice to a city that’s hip, and not just among Israelis. But she’s wrong. The past is hard on her heels. In Schlieben, a nondescript small town in Brandenburg, she comes across clues that lead to her grandmother’s brother, long believed lost. In a thoughtful, intricately interwoven montage that keeps circling the sore spots of her family history Reuveny shows how Feiv’ke first became Feiwusch and ultimately Peter Schwarz. The director tentatively interviews three generations, both in the land of the perpetrators and the land of the victims, running through the various points of view of the difficult discussion about reconciliation. Could it be that suppression is a necessary prerequisite of reconciliation? Feiv’ke did not go to Israel after the war. Of all places, he chose to live in the town where he had been a prisoner in a concentration camp. The barracks were unceremoniously converted and former guards became neighbours, even football mates, as a photo proves. They didn’t talk about the past but rolled up their sleeves to build a “better Germany”. There are still many questions, but perhaps it’s a good thing they weren’t asked before.

Cornelia Klauß

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DEFA Sponsoring Prize 2013