Film Archive

Jahr

Land (Film Archive)

Audience Award Competition 2020
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A Lonely City
Nicola Graef
There’s no better place for a lonely life than Berlin. A portrait of a city with its diverse inhabitants, which strikes the right notes far away from any hullabaloo.
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A Lonely City

Eine einsame Stadt
Nicola Graef
Competition for the Audience Award 2020
Documentary Film
Germany
2019
90 minutes
German
Subtitles: 
English

Loneliness has many faces in Berlin. Young and old are afflicted by it, men, women, single and married people. It’s normal. Nonetheless there’s a stigma attached to this mixture of emotions that makes sufferers stay silent. Director Nicola Graef tries a different approach in her film: She lets the lonely inhabitants of the capital city speak, listens. The result is varied and quite often surprising.

Berlin is a city for extroverts, Tessa thinks. The young woman’s mind, however, is on the opposite site. The consequence is loneliness and that “is quite draining”, she says. 85-year-old Efraim, a photographer and flaneur, has found a confident way to deal with those nagging feelings: He’s “not the type for marriage” anyway. Artist Thomas, on the other hand, suffers from the end of a long-term love affair and wonders whether “the icing sugar is all kissed away by the age of 50”, but also says: “There is a market for everything, even for broken cars.” Poised and affectionate, we move through the expanses of the city in Graef’s film, where stories sprout like weeds between the cobblestones. From the corner pub to the artist’s studio, from the parks to the sports club and, time and again, into the silent flats – she encounters her witnesses to emptiness everywhere. Their reports are moving, but they never make us feel hopeless.
Carolin Weidner

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Nicola Graef
Cinematographer
Alexander Rott, Philip Koepsell
Editor
Kai Minierski
Producer
Susanne Brand, Nicola Graef
Co-Producer
ARTE Deutschland TV GmbH, SWR Südwestrundfunk
Sound
Simon Hückstädt, Matthias Kreitschmann, Carsten Kramer, Luc Brocker, Alexey Fedorov, Oliver Drüppel, Zora Butzke
Score
George Kochbeck
Commissioning Editor
Gudrun Hanke-El Ghomri, Catherine Le Goff