This is a movie about the experience of being a young woman at different times on one specific farm in Germany (at one point East Germany).

I’m not quite sure, but I assume all the women are related. The time periods we see are around WWI, around WWII (although there is not much of this period, which might be because of the lack of time in the production), 1980s when the area is in East Germany (quite close to the border), and 2020s when a family moves to the house to renovate it. There are hints of some kind of a consciousness that permeates these different times. There is a claim that one of the many women in the movie can remember things she should not know about. This isn’t a big deal in the movie, though.

Before I get to spoilers, I would like to say the movie is definitely worth seeing. It’s pretty long and somewhat experimental, but the characters are interesting and you want to see what happens to them and in some cases you want to learn the secrets of the family. If the Oscar nominations for Best International Film wasn’t so packed this year, this would have had a good chance of getting a nomination.

The overarching theme is how the trauma women are subjected to has changed over time. I don’t know how to talk about this without spoilers, so spoilers from now on. On the other hand, the movie is not about plot. There are small plots all over, but there is no overarching narrative. Well, except the trauma.

We start with sexual slavery in the 1910s. Women are a commodity. Alma, a 7-year-old, we follow in the oldest part knows that a maid in their household was made barren in some way so that she couldn’t get pregnant when the farmhands used her. So, sexual slavery. After all, how could she get out of the situation if there is no hope for her of finding a husband. Was this really happening just over a hundred years ago? I don’t know, but you do often find that Europeans are happy to blame other cultures of such practices even though they were widespread around here. See: Cannibalism. Anyhow, Alma’s older sister, Lia, eventually ends up being sent to another household to be a maid. She ends her life instead.

In the 1940s, which is covered least, we see domestic abuse and fear of the Russians. While this era is quite short, this is where the movie actually begins, which makes it inherently more memorable than much of the movie. We see Erika trying out being one-legged by stealing the crutches of her uncle (who lost his leg when his parents decided that they would rather see him lose a limb than go to war). Later we see her older brother beat her for not answering his calls immediately. At the end of the movie, we see her with a group of women who commit mass-suicide for the fear of being raped. Erika does bail out.

In the 1980s, we follow Erika’s niece, Angelika. She is a teenager stuck in East Germany on a farm. It doesn’t suit him. She teases her male cousin constantly and is accused by him of having sex with her uncle. She is flirty and rebellious, although I don’t really see a reason for her to rebel against her parents, who seem very understanding and flexible with her. In the end, she runs away right when the extended family is being photographed. No-one knows what happened to her, but they assume she swam the river and escaped to West Germany. Considering the context of this movie, I fear she might have killed herself.

In the 2020s, Lenka and Nelly move to the house with their parents. Lenka meets Kaya, another girl a few houses down, and they become friends. While Kaya is kind of weird, carrying her own trauma after the death of her mother, Lenka finds herself idolizing Kaya’s confidence (at least outwardly). At the same time Nelly is experiencing something weird. This part ends with Nelly falling from the rafters in the house to her death. It seems that she did it on purpose.

So, yeah, a lot of death in this family, a lot of trauma in this family. Our lives have changed quite a bit in the last hundred-and-a-bit years, but at the same time, trauma still persists. Somehow I was thinking about Chantal Akerman. Her mother was a Holocaust survivor and Chantal seemed to suffer from generational trauma from that. Since she did document her complex relationship to her mother on at least two movies, one from the very start of her career in the mid-70s and another at the end of her career about 40 years later.

Why do I bring this up? Because Chantal Akerman ended her life just a year after her mother died. Traumatized people traumatize people. It might not be physical abuse, but that ghost of something lingers and affects those around you. Maybe you are overbearing or maybe you are unwilling to speak about certain topics or maybe you can’t react properly to something, but that trauma gets spread, even if you have good intentions. This is what the movie gets right.