NOVEMBERKIND

Malchow, GDR, 1980. 20-year-old Anne takes in Yuri, a Red Army deserter, and the pair fall in love. Their new-found happiness is threatened by the warrant of arrest – and the potential death sentence – hanging over Yuri’s head. When the couple flees to the West, Anne is forced to leave behind her six-month-old daughter Inga. Brought up by her grandparents, the child believes her mother drowned while swimming.

25 years later, a professor of literature from Constance visits Inga, and tells her about his former student Anne. Inga begins to re-think her past, and together with the professor embarks on a tour of Germany in search of a mother long believed dead. Although they track down the people involved in the couple’s flight and even the man who purports to be Inga’s father, a wall of silence, rejection, and suppressed guilt rises up in front of them. Inga and Robert get closer to each other in the course of this search, but the professor’s solicitous facade is masking a very different interest. (Catalogue Saarbrücken, 2008)

Schwochow, a graduate of the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, trains a focus on painful aspects of Germany’s divided history. But for all the fog-bound melancholy of the Mecklenburg lake district, this graduation film harbours a hopeful undertone with the mischievously dry wit of the excellent Anna Maria Mühe. By the end, Inga is in a position to put her past behind her and and re-define her identity as she grasps this opportunity to take control of her own life and future.