Films by Henning Fuchs

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]

Germany 2019, 85 min
by Daniel Abma

A huge construction project will change Germany´s most notorious bottleneck forever - a long-term observation over eight years of people living in Spa town Bad Oeynhausen. A film about Germany, small town society and a huge motorway."The spa town of Bad Oeynhausen: Every day, thousands of trucks roll through the city centre and over the B 61 federal road which connects the A2 and A30 motorways, respectively Warsaw and Amsterdam. When the threat of losing its status as a health resort looms on the horizon, which means losing the inviting title of 'Bad', something has to change: A bypass is to be built.Over a period of eight years, the film documents the gridlocked traffic at this bottleneck, the efforts of the mayor, police, fire brigade and construction companies, the delays in the construction of the northern bypass and above all the reactions of the affected residents. The latter look forward to some quiet and relief – or will soon have the motorway right in front of their door. The long-term documentation focuses less on the large-scale infrastructural measures than on their consequences for the people living by the roadside. Other stories are 'picked up' there with a fine instinct for unusual characters and leaving lots of space for their personalities and quirks. These include the local tradition of counting trucks on the federal road or the construction site as well as taking a walk or jogging on the long unfinished section of the road. (Frederik Lang, Catalogue DOK Leipzig 2019)