In autumn 1989, many Leipzig citizens lost patience with the GDR. Within weeks, they brought down a forty-year-old state apparatus resistant to change by rallies. Now their patience is tested again: In 2008, the German Bundestag promised the “City of Heroes” of the Peaceful Revolution a monument. Planning has been going on and on … Leipzig bears the waiting with equanimity; after all, it was not idle in the meantime. Right after reunification, the citizenry took charge of its culture of remembrance with such vigour that the monuments are piling up today. Looking up to the crown of the palm tree of the Nikolai Column, one had better take care not to step on a commemorative plaque, fall into a commemorative fountain or bump into a commemorative bell.
Classicist? Figurative? Abstract? What is the formal language a city chooses to tell itself its own history while it is practically still happening? Locals and newcomers roam the current Leipzig collection of monuments, a man ties his shoelaces on the big toe of the bronze sculpture “Step of the Century”. Do people think about what monuments give them to think about? The subtly framed and laconically presented impressions of the city are intermingled not only with the trademarks and emblems of lived urbanity, but also with the voices of local cultural delegates. They are thinking: about the pros and cons of accelerated remembrance.

“You got to try to live your own life,” Arzu, one of the football players from the Turkish-Kreuzberg girls’ team Ağrı Spor, demanded in a 1995 film by Aysun Bademsoy. Today she is in her late forties and leads her own life, like her former teammates Türkan, Nalan and Nazan. Bademsoy visited the four of them for the fourth time, following their lives, recalling their visions for the future from back then. And this time she also talked to their daughters, some of whom on the brink of adulthood, who also think about adaptation, tradition, religion and culture. Little has changed between then and now, being German remains a difficult question to answer for every generation.
Aysun Bademsoy has produced a delicately layered work of German-Turkish perspectives in which female concepts of identity are reflected back at a society where integration is formulated only as expectation. “If others don’t accept that we are Germans, how are we supposed to accept that?” Selin, Türkan’s daughter, asks. You don’t need to know the other three films to understand “Game Changers” – and to appreciate the significance of this project which now spans almost thirty years. The best thing about it: Football is being played again!