Synopsis
The National Socialist Underground murders in the early 2000s left scars. Not only among the relatives of the victims, but also in the migrant communities and the entire German society.
TRACES follows these scars and poses the question of whether such injuries can ever heal completely.
“Between September 2000 and April 2007, nine immigrant businessmen and a German policewoman were murdered. (…) I read the news about the murders and thought: That could have been my father or my brother.” We’re talking about the murders of the self-proclaimed National Socialist Underground (NSU) which came to light through the main perpetrators’ suicide. After the end of the five-year NSU trial against their co-perpetrators and supporters, filmmaker Aysun Bademsoy goes in search of the traces left by this crime series: in the victims’ families and migrant communities, where the investigators had first investigated exclusively and sowed deep mistrust with speculations of drug trafficking and the Mafia, not least with assignations like “Kebap Murders”. “The NSU murdered my father. The investigators stained his honour. In doing so, they killed him a second time,” a surviving daughter says after the – to her disappointing – judgement was pronounced. Confidence in the German state was deeply shaken and the trial, a sobering experience for all families which left many things in the dark, destroyed rather than restored it. A film about surviving – despite everything.(DOK Leipzig, Frederik Lang)
