Goethe on Demand: City, Country, River – A Cinematic Journey Across Germany
Each month throughout 2024, the streaming series City, Country, River takes us through the diversity of German cities, villages and landscapes with a selection of twelve feature and documentary films. The films focus on regions and places away from the well-known big cities, inviting viewers to take a multi-layered look at the realities of life in Germany.
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84 Minutes. In German with English subtitles.
Germany, 2020, 110 minutes In German with English subtitles.
Writer-Director: Janna Ji Wonders, Producers: Katharina Bergfeld, Martin Heisler, Nadja Smith, Cinematography: Anna Werner, Janna Ji Wonders, Sven Zellner, Production Company: Flare Film (Berlin)
A tourist café on Bavaria’s Lake Walchen serves as the starting point for this female-centred family epic spanning four generations of women. It is a cinematic journey into a century of self-realisation and sense of duty, and the search for one's roots and destiny.
An entire century is covered in this family chronicle, one which was above all shaped by strong women: Shortly after the end of World War One, the filmmaker's great-grandmother moved to Lake Walchen in Bavaria and established an excursion café at the heavenly Alpine location - and as old photographs reveal, even behind the stove she was a glamorous and imposing figure. With exactingness and a sense of duty, her daughter Norma later managed the business well into old age. This, in turn, drove her own daughters, Frauke and Anna, out into the wide world on a search of self-discovery, to the community of Rainer Langhans and, in the case of Frauke, self-chosen death. The film is structured around the direct and sometimes painful conversations that director Janna Ji Wonders has with her mother, Anna, supplemented by perceptive shots of the affectionate relationship between the granddaughter and her elderly grandmother, Norma. It is an investigation of philosophies of life, and of roots, home and destiny. To the benefit of the visual richness of this matriarchal family epic, the family was never shy of filming or photographing their life; and thanks to the almost magical location on Lake Walchen, there is also an anchor point - now run by friends of the filmmaker.
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