A Film a Week - Home Sweet Home

 previously published on Cineuropa

Home films and video don’t lie. Why would they? They have been filmed without any artistic or filmmaking pretence, merely to record moments of life and happiness within the family circle. Or maybe they do lie? Because, artistic pretence or not, the amateur filmmaker or cinematographer at least selects what is and what is not to be shot on film or tape. So even if whatever we see is nothing but the truth, it certainly is not the whole truth.

German editor Annika Mayer chose to utilise Super 8 home movies for her feature-length directorial debut. Home Sweet Home has just premiered in the national documentary competition at DOK Leipzig and takes us behind the idyllic images of the happy life of a family in West Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The family in the Super 8 shots, initially in black and white, then in colour, is not just any family. The parents, Rolf and Rosa, are the filmmaker’s grandparents. Their eldest son Ernst is her father, while the younger Frank is her uncle. The happiness and the idyll in the films that they enjoy during leisure time, trips to the seaside or the mountains, and their sailing adventures might seem real and very much in accordance with the spirit of the times in West Germany, which back then was experiencing an economic boom after the war-time destruction; however, there is something off with one of the faces whose smile tends to look more like a spasm. That face belongs to Grandpa Rolf.

But Grandma Rosa is the one to tell us the story from “behind the scenes” that could not be further from the harmony shown by the home movies. The story she tells is horrific, as it entails terrible domestic abuse in a society that is completely unaware of it. Firstly, Rolf is 13 years older than Rosa, coming from an affluent family, and she was pressed by her own parents to drop out of school in order not to pass up a great marriage opportunity. Secondly, he is a war veteran who served in the Wehrmacht as a gunner, from Paris to Crimea, so he probably suffered from some kind of PTSD. Finally, he was not shy about showing his temperamental issues, even to his parents. Domestic violence is rarely monocausal, so with a patriarchal framework, probable trauma and various personality issues at play, it can get really ugly. Rolf’s reactions were unpredictable, and that coupled with alcohol abuse, a propensity for cheating and unresolved love-life issues made things escalate from regular beatings to more concrete, life-threatening behaviour.

Working with a limited quantity of source material (as is evident from some of the frames repeating themselves throughout the film, especially towards the end), Mayer introduces newly filmed interviews lensed by her co-producer and regular collaborator Jakob Krese, which actually gives Rosa more space to tell her story. The contrast between what we hear and what we see is stark, but also very logical in the wider context of things. Mayer’s own editing is methodical and rhythmic, keeping this concentrated experience to a fitting 67-minute running time. The other hero of the film is the score composer and sound designer, Gaston Ibarroule. His sound design gives another dimension to the doc in a very material way, while his atonal, distorted music comments on the imagery. In the end, Home Sweet Home is anything but sweet, but it is a strong wake-up call.