Here is a mysterious and uncanny prose-poem of guilt, shame and yearning in 20th-century Germany, and the 21st; a drama of intergenerational trauma and genetic memories, visions and experiences suppressed and handed on to descendants and grandchildren in whom they can return as neurotic symptoms of the repressed.
There are visual rhymes and unexplained cosmic echoes, and the film speaks of militarism and resentment, guilt and horror, with dark hints of abuse and sterilisation, the female slavery of domestic servitude and the pastoral world of rural Germany in which the city’s political currents are only dimly perceived. And it gestures at the terrible pathos of the old GDR, which laboured and sacrificed for 40 years after the war in Soviet vassalage finally to discover it was for nothing. The film’s original German title is In Die Sonne Schauen, or Staring at the Sun.
