Janna di Wonders’ moving documentary tells the story of four generations of women in her family. The anchor of the film is the beautiful Walchensee, a lake located about 75km south of Munich in Bavaria. Here the director’s great-grandmother, Ada, opened a tourist café in 1920 that still exists today. It becomes the family business that her daughter Norma dutifully runs. For her grand daughters, Frauke and Anna, it is the base to which they can return after touring as folk musicians in the USA and Mexico or visit on weekends, coming from their commune in Munich and bringing along Rainer Langhans, co-founder of the politically motivated Commune 1 in Berlin. The sisters will go their different ways, however, one increasingly withdraws from life, the other moves to the USA, where she becomes pregnant…
With her family chronicle stretching a century, Wonders not only succeeds in drawing very individual portraits of the formidable, adventurous, but also fragile women in her family. She also manages to campture the changes in in the roles of women and in West German society in general.
Germany 2020, colour & b/w, 110 mins. With English subtitles.
Directed by Janna Ji Wonders
Janna Ji Wonders was Born in Mill Valley, California, and grew up near Lake Walchensee in Bavaria. She studied at the University of Film and Television in Munich and shot numerous music videos. Her documentaries Bling Bling (2001), about the gangster rap scene in L.A., and Street Punk Moscow (2005), about young punks in the suburbs of Moscow, won several awards. Her feature film I Remember was selected for the 2015 Perspektive Deutsches Kino at the Berlin Film Festival while her concept for Walchensee Forever received the „Made in Germany – Perspektive Fellowship“ in 2016; the completed film won the Bavarian Film Award in January 2020.
