Der irrationale Rest

The Irrational Remains

Everything changes when Suse‘s friend Matthias attempts to escape from the GDR with her best friend Susanne. It is 1987, they have just turned 20, and their life, which is just about to begin, is cruelly interrupted. The escape fails: Matthias and Susanne are arrested and Suse is left alone at home.

Sixteen years have to pass before they are ready to get together again. Once living together in close companionship, they now feel only the dis tance that separates them. Matthias, who never got over the events, gives guided tours for tourists through the prison where they were interned. Susanne, who has no desire to be confronted with the past, works as a nurse in the western part of Berlin. Suse is the only one who stayed in Pankow – now with her husband and three children.

Filmmaker Thorsten Trimpop accompanies the three of them to the scenes of the past. The film shows how Matthias and Susanne wander once again through the woods on the border between the former GDR and Czechoslovakia. How Susanne stands in the prison cell where she was once incarcerated, how the three of them gradually bring back the past into their now so different lives, and how painful the memory still is after twenty years. It shows how love and friendship were turned into deep mistrust.

"What do you say at a time like this?" asks Matthias his girlfriends from the past when they first meet again. They have become strangers to one another – except for the remains of the past which still join their lives together.

Source: 55. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)