HELKE MISSELWITZ RETROSPECTIVE AT PLAY-DOC 2022

Helke Misselwitz:
Journeys Through a Country Which Doesn’t Exist Anymore

First Spanish Retrospective



I Came for History and I Left With a Heart Full of People: On Helke Misselwitz

I’ve always had a special relationship with films made at the time I came into this world, especially those relating to my culture. It’s as if they were carrying a secret I was not supposed to know about. I learn from them about the sounds I might have heard but didn’t understand and the faces I saw but couldn’t read at the time. Those films let me exist once more, not as the person I thought I was, but as a tiny part of bigger movements. They make me realize who I am.

Helke Misselwitz shot some of her most accomplished works around the time I was born. This time coincided with the so-called reunification of the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany: the fall of the Berlin Wall. Documenting the final days of a dying country, films like Sperrmüll, Winter Adé or Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann tell me more about life in East Germany than my West German education had ever told me. Those films document a changing world. They can be described as journeys through a country which doesn’t exist anymore.

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