Family Life (2018)

Family Life was shot during a year in a small village in Saxony-Anhalt. Biggi lives in an old farmstead with her 2 daughters, four dogs, cats and horses and her ex-boyfriend Alfred. Biggi and Alfred don't have jobs and lead a very modest existence. They express their feelings and moods by singing their favourite songs. Biggi grew up as an adopted child, Alfred as a child in residential care. Both Denise and Saskia also spent time in care in the past. The fourteen and seventeen year old daughters always find reasons to stay at home, either because of heartache about Kevin or other more serious mental problems. Saskia came back from her residential care placement only recently and is trying to settle at home. Biggi just wants peace and her ex-boyfriend Alfred is longing for a communal life if it weren't for the tensions between him, Biggi and the girls. Family Life is about violence, about neglect, about what comes to light when you live on the edge, if you have dreams of a different life and eventually you realise that you always "walk in circles, and the walls get higher and higher." That's what Alfred said. When he started talking about this circle, spoke about this cycle, which is so difficult to break out of, I knew that was the subject of my film. We need to look very carefully and without prejudice what has shaped people. For instance origin, social class, family, prison, residential care, and feelings like love, dependencies and places, like a secure place, a place to retreat, a place of dreams, no matter how inhospitable it may seem to outsiders. We accompany them in their everyday life filled with conflict, learn something about their dreams, their fears and their hopes, and how hard it is to break out of a circle (cycle). At the end there is a departure. Alfred stays behind. Family life with horses, dogs and cats, TV, PC and smartphone.