Synopsis
As right-wing support grows in Europe, the German center-left politician Thomas Geisel fights to keep himself and his leftist-liberal party from sliding into irrelevance. Searching for politics that make sense to him, the former mayor of Düsseldorf joins a new left-wing populist party that wants to win back the working class. To his 93-year-old father, a lifelong social democrat, this is a betrayal. In this first-person documentary his daughter follows the campaign and family. Just a cockfight of established men? Or a search for where one belongs when the world changes?
Director's Comment:
In Politics are Personal, I try to show how our political lives play out in our private spaces and personal dreams. My aim — in form as much as in content — is radical honesty and openness, which I believe could do our stagnant political culture a great deal of good. I want to tell the story of how I experience politics within my family: as identity and second nature, as a profession you can't hang up at the door when you come home in the evening, as a way of getting your parents' attention, and also as something painful. My film is about being a politician and wanting to be one. About my father's profession, and his father's, and somehow the whole family's.
In politics, everyone gets to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong. That's the tragedy of it, and more importantly the saving grace. For a long time, being in the SPD meant, for me, being unquestionably on the right side. It meant a sense of belonging predetermined by family, like membership in a church. In the postwar decades, social democracy managed to turn Germany into a modern, decent, and economically content republic. Broadly speaking, the SPD still stands for that achievement. But at the same time, no one really knows what, exactly, it stands for anymore. The SPD has lost its voters — and what is far more tragic, the voters have lost their trust in social democracy. The latter is the problem my father hoped the BSW could solve. But it's not that simple. The question of what becomes of social democracy remains open. That is both liberating and disorienting. Or put the other way around: I feel lost, and thus I feel free.
