42film GmbH

Germany 2019, 90 min
by Mario Schneider

If you look into Uta's (70) face, around which the camera circles softly, you can divine her unusual life story. In these rugged, almost male features in her face one thing is written: confidence. Uta is almost blind. She and her partner live a modest life on the breadline. She is a street musician and a unique personality. Her songs tell stories of love and loss, of fast-moving time and a rampant fun society. Hearing of the hard times in her life, one is spellbound and surprised, because Uta has never surrendered to bitterness.

Germany 2013, 88 min
by Uwe Mann

Love does not know time. In 1966 Heiner Hinrichs was the youngest and most successful construction manager of Halle-Neustadt at the age of only 28. At his age he celebrates the autumn of his life with passion and humor and shares it with two women. But now he moves to a new apartment. And so the chubby pensioner has to chop-off his roots from a place that he influenced significantly. His resistance and ongoing will for independence lead to grotesque situations. Heiner Hinrichs shows that love and passion are indeed consistent with being old.

Germany 2012, 98 min
by Mario Schneider

The slag heap rises like a wall above the small town in the Mansfelder Land. It’s a relic of a past when there was still mining and industry here – like the “Glückauf” song that’s always intonated at the start of the Whitsun celebrations. For centuries people have gathered on this date to drive out winter in an archaic ritual. Men wallow in the mud of the unthawed meadows, digging their nails in the earth to be chased away by boys in traditional white costumes decorated with flowers who carry long whips. We see Tom, Paul and Sebastian practice swinging their whips time and again. The film observes them during the preparations for the big day and enters deep into their world. It’s a modest environment where they dream “that everyone has a job” and don’t talk about their feelings. Where they struggle not to go under at school or at the workplace and, above all, not to lose their solidarity – though everything else seems to dissolve. In the last part of his Mansfeld trilogy, Mario Schneider once more looks at people neither the politicians nor the media are interested in. He does it with great warmth and respect. How seriously he takes the life here and the children’s and parents’ stories is proved by the music he devotes to them and uses as an important dramatic element. Nothing less than Stravinsky’s “Le sacre du printemps”, the “spring sacrifice”, stands for the expulsion of the old world. The new world is coming and it will be called Tom, Paul and Sebastian. (Grit Lemke / DOKLeipzig)