A cinematic observation of a landscape shaped and still marked by borders. Even 35 years after reunification, borders are still present in Marienborn. There is the memorial recalling the violence of the SED regime. Just a stone’s throw away, new borders have been added. Refugees now live in the former NVA barracks, which have been converted into a collective accommodation centre. To get here, they, too, had to cross borders, often clandestinely and at the risk of their lives. Now another border separates them from the outside world: a combination of wall and fence that inevitably brings to mind the former border security facilities of the GDR. In long tracking shots whose wide-angle view makes them seem almost otherworldly, the film observes this coexistence of opening and delineation. While the images make continuities visible, the sound brings out the subtle differences between the various locations.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

He is „always sad“, says Uncle Thuận. Connected via mobile phone with his family who are scattered across the world he sings sentimental songs about spring in Hanoi. Meanwhile, his wife Thúy tirelessly looks after the restaurant that the two have been managing in North Rhine-Westphalia for twenty years. They came to the GDR as contract workers at the age of 19. In conversations with their daughters, life stories unfold in which they were rarely expected to decide anything but always to work hard and to function. A role they accept without complaint and justify even today. But the protective shell accumulated over decades increasingly begins to show cracks. And somewhere in the endless routines and tasks of a restaurant kitchen which also structure the film, a question quietly emerges: the question of happiness. In Minh Anh Nguyễn, a post-migrant generation speaks up who regard contract work and racism in the GDR not as a closed chapter but as part of their history. Casual and very close to her protagonists, she tells of colonial legacies that have inscribed themselves into biographies and across generations. At the same time, she shows how this cycle can be broken: By the daughters asking questions which – even outside the Vietnamese community and above all in the East – are long overdue.

Grit Lemke