‘Walchensee Endlessly’: Thessaloniki Evaluation | Evaluations

Dir. Janna Ji miracle. Germany. 2020. 112 min.

The Walchensee, a lake in the Bavarian Alps, is stable in the life of four generations of women from one family. With its lively weather, which intensifies and harmonizes with the stories that unfold in front of the camera, and the shadowy secrets beneath its glass surface, the lake serves both as a place and as a suitable metaphor for the ancestral story of the director Janna Ji Wonders recorded in this rousing, but somewhat overly long family album.

The film really gets going when it follows director Anna Werner’s mother and her spirited younger sister Frauke on the streets

But while the Werner women are the focus of Walchensee Forever, which examines how a single tragedy can anchor an entire family in a sadness that is difficult to escape, the film also works on a secondary level – as a firsthand account of what has passed – Counterculture movement of the 1960s and early 1970s in Germany and America.

A considerable advantage Wonders can tap into is the work of her mother, the photographer Anna Werner, whose revealing, informal portraits are a window into the worlds in which she moved. In addition, each of the women tended to self-chronicle, be it through hoarded letters, home videos or detailed diaries, which makes for a living carpet of memories. Anna Werner’s public profile – she was a member of an “experimental flat-sharing community” known as The Harem – will mean that this intimate trip will likely be most appealing to local audiences when they are familiar with Werner and her circle. Elsewhere, it should arouse further interest in the festival community, especially at specialist documentary events.

The family connection to the Walchensee was established almost a century ago when the great-grandparents of Wonders moved to the area out of mourning over the death of a child and set up a café by the water. Wonders’ soignée great-grandmother enjoyed the role of hostess, who slipped between the kitchen and the tables, immaculately coiffed and covered with jewelry.

But for her daughter Norma (who can be seen in archive footage in the film and is now a fragile 104-year-old), responsibility for the café was taken on out of a sense of duty rather than a calling. And it was a duty that weighed on her marriage to a man who was never wholly healed from his WWII experience. Asking her mother to read aloud from her father’s letter to Norma announcing their separation, Wonders opens the door to the first of many painful memories.

The film really gets going when it accompanies Anna and her spirited younger sister Frauke as they tour Mexico with dulcimer and guitar and perform traditional Bavarian yodelling. Her travels took her to the west coast of the USA, just in time to ride the wave of the 1967 “Summer Of Love”. But from the start, Frauke sought “more extreme experiences”, including peyote rituals in Mexico and psychedelic drugs in San Francisco. In the opening scene of Walchensee Forever, Wonders reveals that Frauke died young; It is a fact ominously on the horizon of a cleverly cut middle section of the film. Frauke’s death in a car accident and alleged suicide that followed a battle with mental health problems is a pivotal moment in history.

But like Anna, Walchensee Forever feels a bit unsteady after Frauke’s death. The grief leads her back to the Walchensee, but her eternal search for meaning makes her restless and restless. There is also a feeling that, despite reopening old family wounds in the film, Wonders is preserving their own experiences as a child who grew up in the tumultuous community environment. In an interview with the male member of the harem, Rainer Langhans, there is a palpable tension. And a revealing moment when another harem founder, Jutta Winkelmann, admits that the experiment was tough for the children, but that perhaps “open shock is better than repression”.

Production company: Flare Film

International sales: Deckert Distribution, info@deckert-distribution.com

Producers: Katharina Bergfeld, Martin Heisler, Najda Smith

Camera: Janna Ji Wonders, Sven Zellner, Anna Werner

Editor: Anja Pohl

Screenplay: Janna Ji Wonders, Nico Week

Sound design: Andreas Lindberg Svensson

Music: Markus Acher, Cico Beck

Contributors: Anna Werner, Janna Ji Wonders, Rainer Langhans, Norma Werner