Lichtblick-Kino

In his film “Heimatkunde” (Lasting Formation), the director returns to the school building of his childhood. For almost 25 years it lay empty, seemingly waiting to be revived. The remains of socialist education are pasted over, hidden, forgotten.

In tentative interviews with contemporary witnesses we are gradually coming nearer to the systematic manipulation of the child’s mind. In this way, it becomes understandable how the dictatorship functioned and turned into the commonplace “that’s just the way it is”, which still exists today and thwarts any criticism of and debate about history.

However, overcoming the German “duality” remains impossible without looking back and reappraising this form of education that generated the authoritarian mind.

The resilient refugee story of a mother and daughter and their escape from Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon. It’s late April 1975 and the Communist North Vietnamese army has entered the city. Everyone is desperate to flee the city and Mui is nine months pregnant with Anh.

On April 29th, they are on the roof of the US embassy along with her husband and two year old son, hoping to escape on a Helicopter. When the last Chopper lifts off, they are still stranded on the roof. What transpires over the three weeks is an improbable and remarkable sequence of events leading to Anh’s birth on a sinking ship, a dramatic helicopter rescue, a refugee camp in Hong Kong and their eventual immigration to Canada.

50 years later – mother, daughter and other key protagonists involved in the story recount how it happened and who they’ve become today. Anh calls it “bringing together all the pieces of her survival puzzle, a reconciliation of the past and present”.