25. Chicago European Film Festival
The popular and critically acclaimed Chicago European Union Film Festival will be back for its 25th edition from March 4 -17! After a scaled-down virtual fest last year, this year's fest will take place in person, offering hand-picked new films from 17 EU nations.
Directed by Jonas Bak, Germany/France/Hong Kong, 2021, 79 minutes, in German, English and Cantonese with English subtitles.
Anke retires from her job at the church in a small town in the Black Forest. She looks forward to reuniting with her children over the summer holidays by the Baltic Sea, at a place where they used to live as a young family, and where she lived her best years. At the last minute, her son Max is unable to join them because of protests that are bringing Hong Kong, where he lives, to a standstill. She has been out of touch with him for many years and after an otherwise uneventful summer and facing the void of retirement, she decides to visit him. A mother wants to check in on her children every now and then, but Hong Kong is also her adventure, her escape. She must spend a few days there by herself until Max returns from a worktrip. Protest-ridden Hong Kong is an enigmatic new world to her through which she moves carefully. Through conversations with strangers, she gradually settles in. A young woman who is sad to leave Hong Kong, Max’s doorman, a psychiatrist, a fortune teller and a social activist. These encounters and her experience of the city help her to break down the inner walls she constructed years ago and make way for a new chapter in her life.
(c) Jonas Bak
Born in Konstanz in 1985 and now based in Freiburg,
Jonas Bak studied film directing at Edinburgh College of Art before moving to London in 2015 and then Hong Kong in 2018 to work as a freelance film director and director of photography. He wrote and directed two short films. WOOD AND WATER (2021) is his first feature film.
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