Nikolaus Tscheschner

The adventure of Melissa and Gustavo starts aboard a red cargo ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. It takes them from Brazil to Berlin, a city of perpetual movement, where the old constantly has to give space to the new. The couple finds a home and transforms it into the center of their own universe. As time passes and seasons change, life and cinema become interchangeable and their apartment evolves into an ever-changing stage, where friends are invited to play their own roles and reality and fiction merge. Until one day a cosmic portal appears in their home, opening connections between the past, the present and the future.

In his first feature film KALMENHOFKINDER - MURDERED AND FORGOTTEN Nikolaus Tscheschner brings a subject to the public which, as the director states, has been suppressed for forty years. Using the example of Kalmenhof, originally founded as a healing and care facility in Idstein, Hesse, the film deals with the National Socialist ›Euthanasia Campaign‹: the murder of patients with intellectual or physical disabilities by the Nazi regime in accordance with the so-called ›Act on Offspring Contraception‹ of July 14, 1933. The reports of fourteen contemporary witnesses form the central narrative of the documentary. The witness reports are illustrated with archive materials, including photographs and original documents from the Kalmenhof area, read out by the director. The demand formulated in 1989 to recognize and remember these long forgotten victims is still relevant today.

In his first feature film KALMENHOFKINDER - MURDERED AND FORGOTTEN Nikolaus Tscheschner brings a subject to the public which, as the director states, has been suppressed for forty years. Using the example of Kalmenhof, originally founded as a healing and care facility in Idstein, Hesse, the film deals with the National Socialist ›Euthanasia Campaign‹: the murder of patients with intellectual or physical disabilities by the Nazi regime in accordance with the so-called ›Act on Offspring Contraception‹ of July 14, 1933. The reports of fourteen contemporary witnesses form the central narrative of the documentary. The witness reports are illustrated with archive materials, including photographs and original documents from the Kalmenhof area, read out by the director. The demand formulated in 1989 to recognize and remember these long forgotten victims is still relevant today.