Niklas Wetzel

Kerstin floats stoically across the Mecklenburg Lake District in her red GDR kayak. Aimlessly, between tourism and dreariness, she glides over the water for days, striving to remain alone. The many rivers and lakes are familiar to her. But where does Kerstin come from? What is she fleeing from? Who is pursuing her? The evenness of this journey breaks when Alima appears, finally asking the paddling loner the right questions.

À travers le regard d’un jeune ethnologue à l’éthique ambiguë, une fiction abordant le génocide commis au tournant du XXe siècle par l’Empire allemand dans ses colonies du Sud-Ouest africain.

To see snow and learn German, the young Vietnamese girl Trúc Lâm (Nano Nguyen) moves to a small town in the middle of the Erzgebirge mountains in Saxony. She is fascinated by the forest, the mountains and the clear air that smells of clouds and winter and burns her nose when she breathes it in - for which she is mocked by her classmates. On a trip to a mine, she gets lost in the labyrinth of dark shafts and suddenly emerges on the other side of the mountain. This world is almost identical to the old one - but the characters have been replaced. In the town on the other side, she meets Duc (Tri An Bui), the son of a Vietnamese family who run an Asian snack bar. And while Duc tries to find a balance between his German-Vietnamese heritage and the expectations of others, Trúc Lâm accepts the help of a ghost to find her way back into her world.