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Special Screening
2014
Meine Mutter, ein Krieg und ich Tamara Trampe, Johann Feindt

A mother who gave birth during the war and continued to fight. A daughter who asks questions today. About women in the Great Patriotic War: the pain of untold stories.

2014

Meine Mutter, ein Krieg und ich

Special Screening
2014
Documentary Film
Germany
2014
78 minutes
Russian
subtitles: 
English
Credits DOK Leipzig Logo
Producer
Johann Feindt, Doris Hepp
Director
Tamara Trampe, Johann Feindt
Cinematographer
Johann Feindt
Editor
Stephan Krumbiegel
Script
Tamara Trampe
Sound
Jule Katinka Cramer
Faded photos of young women in Red Army uniforms. One of them is Tamara Trampe’s mother, who gave birth on a snowy field in Voronezh in the winter of 1942 and managed against all odds to keep her baby alive on the frontline. The girl was never to meet her father, an officer, and grew up in the GDR with her mother’s German husband. By that time her mother had locked her war traumas away deep inside, from where they haunted the children like bogeys. It was not until shortly before she died that she was able to talk about the war, in front of her daughter’s camera.
The daughter starts to track down her mother’s old female comrades in arms in the Ukraine. They are hard to find, unwilling to speak. No one wanted to hear their stories in a society that is keeping alive the myth of the Great Patriotic War even today. Pictures of war museums and student nurses who imitate frontline habits provide a sparing commentary on those of the old women in their humble dwellings.
The film, however, never refers the problem to “those people” in the East. On the contrary, a power structure that is running through history even today emerges from behind the allusions and perhaps elisions. Like every good film, this one hurts. It’s the pain about the untold stories, in the families, in society. The saddest sentence is spoken by one of the old women: “I will soon have forgotten myself.”
Grit Lemke

The annotations to the films in the Official Selection were written by the members of the selection committee and guest authors. All quotes from DOK Leipzig catalogue articles must be identified as such and cite the author’s name. Some original titles and names have been transcribed resp. transliterated. We apologise that we cannot cite individual image sources and rights in our festival publications or festival coverage. Please note that the visual material is published exclusively for the purposes of promoting specific films or festival programmes. No transmission to third parties is provided and would only take place with the explicit agreement of the owners of the rights. The rights to the images lie with the respective copyright owners.

Special Screening
2014
Money in Minutes Monika Hielscher, Matthias Heeder

Every year migrants send 420 billion US dollars around the globe. Quick money for Western Union and MoneyGram. About winners and losers of globalisation.

2014

Money in Minutes

Special Screening
2014
Documentary Film
Germany
2014
95 minutes
English
Arabic
Chinese
Italian
Nepali
Spanish
subtitles: 
English
Credits DOK Leipzig Logo
Producer
Heino Deckert
Director
Monika Hielscher, Matthias Heeder
Music
Lars Ohlendorf
Cinematographer
Roland Wagner
Editor
Michelle Barbin
Script
Monika Hielscher, Matthias Heeder
Sound
Ralf Richter
More than 200 million migrants work outside their home country. They send an annual 400 billion US dollars to their families to help or support them. Companies like Western Union or MoneyGram play a pivotal role in this system: in most cases, the money earned by the migrants is sent home by this apparently simple, quick and independent route. But the mechanisms behind the industry, the profit oriented machinations of the money transfer institutions and the sometimes morally dubious and even criminal-seeming business model of the money transfer companies are hidden from their customers. Monika Hielscher and Matthias Heeder have investigated the privations suffered by those who want to support their relatives and friends. Their main focus is on how and by which routes the money travels from one place to the other – and what’s really left of it in the end. The result is an alarming and sobering picture of the state of our planet, where wealth is often created through the poverty of others.
Kim Busch

The annotations to the films in the Official Selection were written by the members of the selection committee and guest authors. All quotes from DOK Leipzig catalogue articles must be identified as such and cite the author’s name. Some original titles and names have been transcribed resp. transliterated. We apologise that we cannot cite individual image sources and rights in our festival publications or festival coverage. Please note that the visual material is published exclusively for the purposes of promoting specific films or festival programmes. No transmission to third parties is provided and would only take place with the explicit agreement of the owners of the rights. The rights to the images lie with the respective copyright owners.