In the opening image, there is a grid between the camera and the world, conveying the field of vision of an Israeli soldier deployed as a cameraman in the Israeli-occupied territories between 2007 and 2010. The filmmaker’s self-critical comments today ask what he could and could not see then. Leaving the country and arriving in Germany triggered a learning process that he traces here in a multi-layered and very personal research: “I learned I can’t trust myself to do the right thing.”
Complex camera pans show current German street scenes that bundle up signs of a precarious coexistence, while family and friends drift apart over the so-called Middle East Conflict. Ron Rothschild now lives in a country that his grandmother had to flee at the age of seven to escape from the Nazis. Even in old age, she could still recite Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” from memory. Once arrived in Haifa, she became a soldier and part of the establishment of the state of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians. The yearning to belong creates ambivalences and open questions in the family’s history, which the grandson confronts without resolving the ever-new distances emerging between the camera eye and the world.

Is it possible to get close to someone who sees their sole task in life in losing themself in the parts they play? How can a film portrait be created when every image only contributes to further fictionalization? Who is facing each other when the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred? Katharina Pethke looks back to dissect the past and her contradictory feelings for the celebrated actor Philipp Hochmair, following the lines of her own artistic and personal doubts.

The magnificent black and white images guide the eye from the surfaces to the details, whose meaning the director probes and questions in her subjective, tentative voiceover. The film preserves the rawness of unfinished reflections without getting mired in vagueness. Step by step, the honest assessment of a desire is achieved; a desire which could function only in the delicate balance between attraction and repulsion and from which Katharina Pethke frees herself by adopting a position of artistic distance. Her sometimes self-mocking commentary is supported by dramatic guitar riffs (provided by Hochmair’s band project “Die Elektrohand Gottes”) and underpinned by filmic references, all of which revolve around the making of images and the relationship between reality and imagination.

As she visits an exhibition, a graphic designer is mesmerised by the photocollages of the anti-fascist John Heartfield, who became known as the “montage dada.” Stefanie falls through a vortex of paper and photo snippets into an old-fashioned looking studio. A pair of scissors – an analogue tool she herself hardly uses – attracts her attention. She begins to cut a figure out of cardboard, a miniature version of the artist who at once addresses her and explores his life and works with her. The studio turns out to be a living archive that ceaselessly produces documents and information about Johnny. The research gives Stefanie, stressed and disappointed by her job, new motivation, and the courage to choose a different path as a designer.

Both protagonists have the same profession and find themselves facing the same questions about the significance and recognition of their work. Both are struggling in their own way with frustration and fears, caused by the different social and political circumstances of their generations. The different elements of this animated documentary come together in a dialogic collage that reflects on the mission of art, its educative and critical power, and its potential to bring about changes in our society.