Independence (2023)

The Afro-German actor Helen Wendt takes the audience on a journey along her family history between the GDR, Mozambique and West Berlin, while exploring how her identity and personal independence is embedded in the social context of Germany. In a hybrid approach, the film simultaneously follows members of independence movements in Mozambique, South Sudan, Great Britain, Catalonia and Bavaria, asking what it means for people to fight for their freedom. What does independence truly mean and how do colonialism and racism, the causes of many independence movements, define the world to this day? While learning more about Helen's past through encounters with her mother in Berlin and her father and half-sister in Maputo, the camera embeds within angry protests, portraits emotional reports of politicians, freedom fighters, refugees and ordinary citizens, glides through meditative imagery of coastlines and mountains and unites the polyphonic narratives at Black Lives Matter protests in Berlin. "Independence" takes a multi-layered approach, placing individual and political experience on equal footing, combined with sequences of a choreographic installation in which Helen performs - the latter being part of the cross-platform, documentary art project "Fight (for) Independence".