Films by Lara Milena Brose

Germany 2024, 70 min
by Lara Milena Brose

August 2021. The world watches as the Taliban come back to power in Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people flee. Many of them end up trapped in the non-EU state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.Like Nahid, a 15-year-old girl who is stranded in this nowhere place after a nerve-wracking flight from Herat. The voice messages from home increasingly sound like a distant echo. But there is no time for nostalgia in this daily life between illegality and pushbacks. There is just one goal: get her family away from this ramshackle camp. Luckily, there are people like Ferida and the shady but good-hearted coffee shop owner Elvir in town.Ferida lives right at the border and as she watches people return humiliated from their attempts to cross the border, memories of her own past slowly come back to her.While Ferida loses herself in reminiscence, Nahid discovers that the cycle of war and loss connects her to the place more than she expected.

Germany 2021, 30 min
by Lara Milena Brose, Kilian Armando Friedrich

After years of criminal and self-destructive behavior, 27-year-old Leon is at last trying to rid himself of his heroin addiction in a residential clinic. He publishes a vlog about his experiences and tells his therapists what they want to hear, but actually he’s totally fed up with life. On the other hand, his father Hans-Joachim, who's 50 years older, is brimming with zest for life, despite his aging body. That’s why this landscape artist wants to become immortal, as a “homo digitalis.” He’s using a chatbot loaded with journal extracts in an attempt to create a digital version of himself.When Leon is released on leave from rehab, he visits his father, who he hasn’t seen for a long time. Rather than underscoring the differences between father and son, filmmakers Lara Milena Brose and Kilian Armando Friedrich let the images speak for themselves. These scenes make it painfully clear how self-hatred is intertwined with self-obsession, how life is intertwined with survival, and how different parents and children can be. [IDFA 2021]