Films by Christoph Walter

Germany 2024, 91 min
by Daniel Abma

When parents can no longer fulfil their duty of care, the children’s world often falls apart. Nothing stays as it was. Suddenly it is no longer mum or dad who are in charge but the youth welfare system. Daniel Abma followed a youth housing group in a rural area over several years, showing professional educators who want to give five boys between the ages of seven and fourteen what they need most urgently, day by day: security, orientation, a home.The documentary focus is not on the children but on those who take the parents’ place. They sometimes remind us of Don Quixote tilting at the windmills, for there is a diffusion of responsibility between school, youth welfare services, and absent mothers and fathers. Words fail when adults do not keep appointments, when those in charge capitulate in the face of racist bullying and propose some “time out” – for the bullied boy – in a psychiatric facility. It would be easy to denounce these mechanisms, but that is not the point Daniel Abma wants to make. His observation, both emphatic and reserved, looks questioningly into the gaps in the system – with those who are in danger of falling through and those who try to fill them with affection. He makes us suspect that the answer is not to close all the system’s gaps. It is people who are there for other people and take responsibility. [67 DOK Leipzig, Luc-Carolin Ziemann]

2018, 90 min
by Antonia Hungerland

On her quest to find out what motherhood means for herself, director Antonia Hungerland encounters all kinds of people, none of whom seem to correspond to our traditional notion of a mother. What is a ‘real mother?Motherhood is the most natural thing in the world. Or so it’s said. Yet the demands on women with children have rarely been as challenging and contradictory as they are in the Western world today. Hopes of happiness are often followed by discrimination, excessive demands and feelings of guilt. The role of mother has become a glorified ideal, but one that is still often legitimised as “woman’s true nature”. We live at a time where three people could claim to be the same child’s mother: the donor who donates her eggs to enable another woman to conceive, the surrogate mother who bears a child on behalf of someone else and the woman who ultimately raises the child. But men, too, frequently bring up children – without the support of a woman – for example,in homosexual relationships or if children stay with the father after a divorce. What makes a human being a real mother? Director Antonia Hungerland embarks on a personal quest to find out what motherhood means to her personally. She encounters all kinds of people, none of whom seem to correspond to our traditional notion of a ‘real mother’. What is their vision of motherhood? A personal and poetic documentary that raises socially pertinent and forward-looking questions.