"Malou" (1981)

Director and script: Jeanine Meerapfel

Photography: Michael Ballhaus

Music: Peer Raben

Sound: Gunter Kortwich

Editing: Dagmar Hirtz

Production: Regina Ziegler- Filmproduktion GmbH

Cast: Ingrid Caven, Grischa Huber, Helmut Griem, Ivan Desny

35 mm, colour, 94 min., German with English, French and Spanish subtitles.

Awards: International Critic Award - FIPRESCI, Cannes 1981; 1st Prize ("Alfonso Sánchez") and Mention of the International Catholic Film Organization, San Sebastián 1981; 1st Prize Chicago 1981.

Film Festivals: New York (New directors), Taormina, Montreal, Sidney, Thessaloniki, London, Istanbul, etc.

Summary:

Two life stories. That of Malou, a French woman, married to a German Jew, a refugee stranded in South America: a picture of the pre-war generation reflected in the unusual destiny of an individual woman. And that of Hannah, an alert, independent, modern woman, seeking after freedom and her own identity, and trying in present-day Berlin to save her shaky marriage.

Two love stories. Malou and Paul, the nostalgic fairytale: a dream couple - rich and romantically in love - a love story that can only end in tragedy. And Hannah and Martin: a recognizably real married couple with all the acute problems of any contemporary two-person relationship. Two women, two love stories: mother and daughter, two lifes that sometimes mirror one another, frequently cross, and constantly complement one another.

Press comments:

"The values of 'Malou', the first feature to be written and directed by Jeanine Meerapfel, a German film maker, reveal themselves unexpectedly, much like those of a friendship with someone who initially seems demanding and self-centered but whose genuine decency and intelligence become evident with time."
The New York Times, New York (December 22, 1983)

"The film is beautifully played by Ingrid Caven as Malou and Grischa Huber as her daughter, and handled by Meerapfel with the kind of insight that seems to come from a long and personal battle with the demons of her own life. "
The Guardian, London (June 9, 1983)

"... Jeanine Meerapfel révèle, on lá vu, une grande maîtrise dans la direction d´acteurs ..." Libération, Paris (Louella Interim, May 21, 1981)

"In the country of my parents" (1981)

Director and script: Jeanine Meerapfel

Photography: Peter Schäfer

Sound: Hans Schmitz

Editing: Heidi Murero

Music: Jakob Lichtmann

Production: Westdeutscher Rundfunk 1981, Germany

Cast: Anna Levine, Luc Bondy, Meier Breslav, Eva Ebner, Sarah Haffner, Jakob Lichtmann

16 mm, colour, 88 min., German with English subtitles.

Awards: Golden Ducat Award, Mannheim 1981; Mention of the Catholic Church in Germany , Mannheim 1981.

Film Festivals: Florence, Cinéma des femmes París, Montreal, Berlin, San Sebastián, etc.

Summary:

"Had it not been for Hitler, I would have been born a German-Jewish child, more German than Jewish, in a small village in the South of Germany. But as it happened, I was born in Argentina, my mothertongue is Spanish. I came to Germany 17 years ago."

It is here, where author and director Jeanine Meerapfel starts searching for her own Jewish identity, being confronted time and time again with Federal Republic reality.

At the same time she is not interested in a journalistic survey, statistics and politics but her own situation in life, full of doubts and fears, including Germany as such and others concerned.

Same as in her first feature-film "Malou" , Jeanine Meerapfel examines - apart from the subjective aspects of the problem - what it means to live as a Jewess in this country, to which a friend, when asked said: "There are far worse things happening today than to be a Jewess in Germany."

The film doesn't offer ready-made answers, it rather puts open questions.

Press comments:

"The speeches are amazingly candid and often painfully touching. (...) Jeanine Meerapfel has deliberately chosen a non-confrontational tenor for her film, eschewing the 'horror show' mentality to prevalent in other documentaries on the subject."
Jump Cut, USA (Shawn S. Magee, No. 30)

"Melek leaves" (1985)

Director and script: Jeanine Meerapfel

Photography: Johann Feindt

Music: Jakob Lichtmann

Sound: Paul Oberle/ Margit Eschenbach

Editing: Klaus Volkenborn

Production: Journal Film KG, Klaus Volkenborn

Cast: Melek Tez, Family Kantemir, Niyazi Türgay, Maksud Yilmaz, Erna Krause, Etta Czach

16 mm, colour, 88 min., German with English and Spanish subtitles

Awards: Otto Dibelius-Award of the Evangelic Church, Berlin 1985; German Film Critic's Award 1985.

Film Festivals: Berlin, London, Leipzig, Edinburgh, Strasbourg, Festival du cinéma du reél, Paris, Valladolid, etc.

Summary:

The real life of one Turkish immigrant tells more than statistics and the worn-out slogans about foreigner-politics in West-Berlin. The film depicts some facts about the life and the destiny of Melek, a 38 years old Turkish woman, who decides to go back to her home country after 14 years of living and working in Berlin.

It's the portrait of an unusual person, a woman with quite a lot of chuzpeh and a strong will to survive. She forces us to reconsider the stereotyped idea we commonly have about a "typical" Turkish woman.

It's impossible to classify Melek into one-sided categories. And the same happens to the film about Melek: it's a documentary but also a fiction, a collection of images and associations about her Istanbul dreams and her Berlin experiences.

"Melek leaves" is an attempt to describe the invisible wounds that have marked a "Gastarbeiterin", a migrant worker, after 14 years in West Germany.

Press comments:

"...'Melek Leaves' does far more than simply record Gemany's treatment of guest workers: it takes a provocative, sideways look at the roots of racist attitudes, the conventions of film-making and the difficulty of turning messy, awkward, real lives into neat documentaries. A film, in fact, which ends up far bigger than the sum of its parts."
Edinburgh Film Festival Programme, Edinburgh (Jane Root, August of 1985)

"...'Melek Leaves' was programed in the festival [London Film Festival] and proved as well to be one of the critical highlights..."
Asian Times, London (Dorothea Moritz, December 12, 1985)

"Days to remember" (1987)

Director and script: Jeanine Meerapfel

Photography: Predrag Popovic

Music: Jürgen Knieper

Editing: Ursula West

Sound: Marco Rodic

Production: Joachim von Vietinghoff Filmproduktion GmbH/ Art Film 80/ Zeta Film/ Aleksandar Stojanovic

Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Horst-Günter Marx, Ljiljana Kontic, Beta Zivojinovic, Rade Serbedzija

35 mm, colour, 95 min., German with English subtitles

Film Festivals: Berlin, Pula, Moscow, Montreal, etc.

Summary:

They meet in Jugoslavia. Katharina, daughter of a Jugoslavian immigrant worker, has grown up in the Federal Republic of Germany. She is a confident, energetic career woman who has managed to work her way up to become a succesful television journalist. She goes to visit her parent's country, to do a story about the children of immigrant workers in their home country. Although she says she doesn´t need a "home" any more, even she feels strange in her own country.

Peter is a rather "untypical" sort of man: a dreamer, a thinker. He has given up his steady job as a composer for advertising films and is divorced. He goes to Jugoslavia to find something out about the past. He travels to the places where his father was stationed during the Second World War.

The love affair between Katharina and Peter follows none of the usual rules of the game. They are both far too preoccupied with themselves and their role reversal is too jarring, too extreme. Men like Peter have been taught by women to take their emotions more seriously; women like Katharina have developed a thick skin as a result of their profession and working in a man's world. Here is a woman who wants to make a man hers as swiftly as possible, and a man who tends to hold back, to hesitate.

The three days they spend together are full of constant confrontations with history and with their pasts; Katharina with her repressed identity complex about whether she is Jugoslavian or German, and Peter with his guilt complex about his father's Nazi past.

Together they visit the village where Katharina's mother lives. The family thinks the two of them are engaged, and the couple play them along. During a bus journey through Montenegro with no particular destination, the two continue their search for themselves: they discover each other, fall in love and sense that it could develop into more than just an affair. Each of them is prepared to get closer to the other...

Press comments:

"... this intelligent and romantic drama ..."
Movieline (Annette Insdorf, October 23, 1987)

"Desembarcos - When Memory Speaks" (1986-89)

Director : Jeanine Meerapfel
(collaboration: Alcides Chiesa)

Script: Jeanine Meerapfel

Photography: Victor González

Sound: Alcides Chiesa

Editing: Heni Bouwmeester

Music: José Luis Castiñeira de Dios

Production: Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía/Goethe-Institut/Jeanine Meerapfel

16 mm, colour, 74 min., German with English, French and Spanish subtitles

Awards: "El caimán barbudo", Havanna 1990; City of Straßbourg-Award 1990.

Festivals: Strasbourg, Berlin, Leipzig, Hong Kong, Istanbul, etc.

Summary:

Between 1976 and 1982 thousands of citizens were kidnapped, tortured and killed in Argentina. How do Argentinians cope with this tragedy? How do they elaborate their recent past?

In 1986, Jeanine Meerapfel directed a film workshop in Buenos Aires, organized by the local Goethe-Institute. Three groups of students were to shoot their own scripts. The given theme was fear and the students' scripts reflected the fright that remained in Argentina after the military dictatorship: fear or repression, torture, exile... but mainly the fear that all that had happened could be forgotten.

During the workshop, questions and doubts came up. Why remember? Is it necessary to revive the past over and over again? What can cinema do against crimes and violations of human rights? Questions about the utility of aesthetics and fiction confronted with the reality in the streets of Buenos Aires.

Directors' Note

" 'Desembarcos' is about the necessity to remember what happened during the military dictatorship in Argentina, to remember the thousands kidnapped, tortured, murdered. It shows this open wound of the Argentinian society reflected in this group of young people. It also shows their hopes, their quest to find their own identity in the struggle to remember and remind. This film is done with very little money but with the passion and the belief that film keeps history alive."

Press comments:

"Jeanine Meerapfels produktiver, sehenswerter Beitrag besticht argumentativ vor allem durch die Offenheit seines Diskurses, mit dem schonungslos Fragen der gesellschaftlichen Identität angegangen werden, die die Menschen in ihrem Denken und Handeln bewegen." Die Wahrheit, Berlin (Rainer Braun, 11. 12.02.89)

"Der Film meidet die vorschnelle, die allzu einfache und eindeutige Position. Die Haltung bleibt immer klar, aber sie soll nicht oktroyiert, sondern erfahren werden"
Die Zeit, Hamburg (Norbert Grob, 16.06.89)

"... esa múltiple vertiente narrativa, resuelta con estimable dinamismo ... 'Desembarcos' es una obra vigorosa ..."
Página/12, Buenos Aires (María Núñez, 28.02.89)

"... una contemplación melancólica que no desdeña la reflexión."
(Víctor Hugo Ghitta, 31.03.89)

" ... refleja conmovedoramente el trabajo de un grupo de cineastas que dirigió en un taller del Instituto Goethe, y aprovecha con gran inteligencia los momentos previos a la sanción de la llamada ley de punto final."
Ambito Financiero, Buenos Aires (Nan Giménez, 31.03.89)

"La Amiga" (1988)

Director: Jeanine Meerapfel

Script: Jeanine Meerapfel/Alcides Chiesa

Photography: Axel Block

Editing: Juliane Lorenz

Sound: Dante Amoroso/Gunter Kortwich

Music: José Luis Castiñeira de Dios

Production: Klaus Volkenborn, Journal Film KG, Berlin/Alma Film GmbH, Berlin/Jorge Estrada Mora Producciones, Buenos Aires

Cast: Liv Ullmann, Cipe Lincovsky, Federico Luppi, Victor Laplace, Harry Baer

35 mm, colour, 109 min., Spanish with English subtitles and a dubbed German version.

Awards: German Federal Award 1989; Award OCIC, Havanna 1988; Award of the Filmfest Nuremberg 1990; best Actress für Liv Ullmann and Cipe Lincovsky, San Sebastián 1988.

Film Festivals: Montreal, Sydney, Chicago, Strasbourg, Latin Festival New York, Miami, Istanbul, Cologne, etc.

Summary:

This film is a story of a close, but complex friendship between two women against the backdrop of the military dictatorship. They swear everlasting friendship and promise to become actresses. Twenty years later, Raquel has indeed become a famous Argentine actress. Maria is married to an electrician and has three children.

1976. The military take over the government. Carlos, Maria's oldest son, is taken away by a special commando. Despairing, Maria turns to her influential girlfriend, Raquel. The two women begin their search for Carlos. The two go to police departments, barracks, official bureaus. But nobody will give them information. And those who ask questions are themselves suspicious. Raquel is also threatened.

Raquel leaves the country. She goes to Germany, to Berlin, the town her family was forced to leave when Hitler came to power. In the meantime, Maria joins the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo - a group of Argentine women all looking for missing members of their families. The two women do not see each other again until Maria comes to Germany to meet a friend of her missing son. Raquel realizes how much Maria has changed, how self-confident and uncompromising this shy woman from the suburbs has become. The old friendship is still there, but the differences in their opinions and attitudes to life have widened.

December 1983. The military dictatorship in Argentina comes to an end and Raquel returns to Buenos Aires. Frightened and insecure, she tries to adapt and to look forwards. She wishes her girlfriend would also give up her demands. She urges Maria to accept that Carlos is dead. Maria refuses: her son is not dead, he is "missing". Nothing should be forgotten, so that nothing can be repeated.

Press comments:

"This is a political film in the best sense, dramatising the effect of ideology and its application on human feelings and relationships. The treatment, moreover, is fully worthy of the theme. Ullmann (successfully dubbed) and Linkovsky shared the best actress award for their performances [1988 San Sebastian Film Festival]."
The Guardian, London (Tim Pulleine, May of 1991)

"Aesthetically, 'La Amiga' has much to offer, with richly textured scenes of life in Buenos Aires and Berlin. The filmmaker's eye travels through the story in an inventive montage of everyday details..."
The Northern Califonia Jewish Bulletin (Marianne Goldsmith, July 21, 1989)

"When so many films those days seem to have precious little in the way of either style or content, it is doubly reassuring to find one with both. (...) The atmosphere of violence is the more powerfully conveyed for being mainly suggested, and the narrative is elliptical without becoming obscure ..."
The Guardian Guide, London (May 18, 1991)

"Amigomío" (1995)

Directors and Script: Jeanine Meerapfel/ Alcides Chiesa

Photography: Victor González

Sound: Paul Oberle/ Jorge Stavropulos

Editing: Andrea Wenzler

Music: Osvaldo Montes

Production: Telefilm Saar Saarbrücken GmbH/ Malena Films GmbH/ Chelko S.R.L., Buenos Aires

Cast: Daniel Kuzniecka, Diego Mesaglio, Mario Adorf

35 mm, colour, 114 min., Spanish with English subtitles, and a German dubbed version.

Awards: William-Dieterle-Film Award 1996: Saarland-Award 1990 for the Best Script.

Film Festivals: Havanna, Bogotá, Puerto Rico, Huelva, Istanbul, London, Cartagena de las Indias, Munich, Göteborg, Saarbrücken, Atlanta, Washington and Santa Monica, Montreal, Belgrade, Gramado, Trieste, etc.

"Anna´s Summer" (2001)

Director & Screenplay: Jeanine Meerapfel

Director of Photography: Andreas Sinanos

Editor: Bernd Euscher

Music: Floros Floridis

Executive Producer: Dagmar Jacobsen, Integral Film, Germany

Cast: Anna (Angela Molina), Max (Herbert Knaup), Leon Kastelano (Dimitris Katalifos), Malena (Rosana Pastor), Anna Levi (Maria Skoula)

Production: Integral Film, Berlin

In coproduction with: Jeanine Meerapfel Malena Films (Germany), Fanis Synadinos, FS Production (Greece), José Luis Borau, EL IMAN (Spain), WDR, ARTE and ERT

In cooperation with: CANAL + Spain

This film was supported by: Filmstiftung NRW, BKM, Filmboard Berlin- Brandenburg, Greek Film Center, Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, Eurimages

contact = Jeanine Meerapfel - Malena Films GmbH
email: meerapfel@aol.com
address: Droysenstr. 6, 10629 Berlin/ Germany
Phone/ Fax: +49-(0)30-324 6495

World sales = Media Luna Entertainment GmbH
email: info@medialuna-entertainment.de

soundtrack-CD available at: floridis@aol.com

Film Festivals: Montréal 2001, Chicago 2001, Mannheim-Heidelberg 2001, Hof 2001, Museum of Modern Art - New York 2001, Thessaloniki 2001, Lünen 2001, Berlin 2002, Mar del Plata 2002 (Sonderpreis der Jury), Innsbruck 2002, Shanghai 2002, Jerusalem 2002, Jewish Festival San Francisco 2002, Mittelmeerfestival Köln 2002 and others.

Summary:

ANNAS´ SUMMER

Anna Kastelano is packing up the home that had belonged to her family on a Greek island. She is considering putting it up for sale. However, in these familiar surroundings, she is revisited by memories of her own past and that of her Sephardic-Jewish family. Anna has not yet got over the death of her husband Max. She spends the summer on the island, which has become her second home, trying to come to terms with her solitude. The summerhouse overlooks the small harbour. The view extends over the Aegean Sea. Anna loves the worn stone steps, the shady groves, the stray cats, the wild herbs. For the first time, she opens the family´s iron chest. Memories and ghosts rise up, with whom she cooks, dances and picks figs. She finds old telegrams relating to the fate of her grandmother Anna. She also discovers the diary of another Anna, her father´s first love. But the present also makes itself felt. Anna meets Nikola. He is considerably younger than she and does odd jobs around the island. Her relationship with Nikola and the feelings she is experiencing intermingle with her mourning and the moving discoveries about her family. Anna is searching for a path through the labyrinth of her history and ultimately decides to assume her place in it. Life goes on.

Comments:

"Anna´s Summer" is a film that crosses cinematic boundaries, and thus abandons the comfort of film genres to look at the unresolved, unlikely stuff of life. It is a film about the demons and friends of memory, and so addresses anyone who has ever left a place he wanted to stay or been left by a person they wanted to love. Time moves on, disinterested in our attachments.
"Anna´s Summer" is also a "woman´s film" that pokes fun at women´s films. Women artists are these days accused of being obsessed with the inner life, with emotion and self-reflection, in fact, with looking at their navels. And so the opening shot of the film is of a woman looking into a mirror at her navel. OK; let´s really do it. Yet, in the end, the motives of this woman, Anna, are the motives of men. Certain sorts of fun, sexual flings and fears get us all.
Finally, "Anna´s Summer" tells the story of a Jewish family during the Second World War but avoids the heated moves of many Holocaust movies which, as they are repeated, become expectable. The film describes plainly the nature of the people in Anna´s life, their illicit affairs, business deals, and how they can just get fed up with each other. "Anna´s Summer" looks at their impact on each other and on Anna, and in this it is more interested in psychology than in the epic drama of the Shoah. What kind of woman does one become-what kind of lover does one choose-if one had a father who was both generous and authoritarian, a mother who was irresponsible but also compelling, uncles who didn´t necessarily get along and who saved themselves but not others.
In "Anna´s Summer", all these "movies" come together in the a-rational sequence of recollection. As in life, Anna does not remember logically....
Marcia Pally, February 2001

Press comments:

The kind of peacefully contemplative arthouse item that's become more the exception than the rule, "Anna's Summer" stars Angela Molina as a 50-year-old photojournalist who welcomes the friendly spirits of her Sephardic-Jewish ancestors to the family home she's inherited on a spectacular Greek island. Pic may be limited in contempo theatrical world by that very same trait but will resonate on the fest circuit, be welcomed by distribs who know their upscale auds and embraced in ancillary.
"Go away, ghosts," says Anna Kastelano (Molina) as she throws open her bedroom shutters to the sparkling Aegean Sea. But the spirits aren't so easily dismissed. Her recently deceased companion of some 30 years, Max (Herbert Knaup), still spends a lot of time with her, as does her father Leon -- who, it turns out, had a young lover named Anna.
She even learns a bit of the mysterious circumstances surrounding her grandmother's murder at Auschwitz. In between these daydreams and her spells of regional cooking, she finds time to develop a tentative relationship with laborer Nikola (Agis Emmanouil), who yearns to leave the island for the lures of the city.
As Anna wrestles with the decision to sell the grand house, the past and present intertwine with benevolent fluidity. Writer-director Jeanine Meerapfel exhibits a sure hand with the delicate business of bringing long-departed ancestors back to life, stripping the process of all gimmickry and sensationalism while gently subverting tenets of woman's melodrama. Molina becomes more beautiful as time and pic progress.
Tech credits are clean and lovely, with camera of d.p. Andreas Sinanos (who shot Theo Angelopoulos' Cannes-winning "Eternity and a Day") caressing the region's rugged, sun-drenched beauty.
Press review by Variety.com (Eddie Cockrell, September 14, 2001)

"Fictional lies on right occasions " (2003)

A film diary by Jeanine Meerapfel
2003, 54 minutes, DV, O.V. Greek with English subtitles

with:

Synopsis:

A film diary about the recording process of a series of improvised music-sessions in the former warehouse of a windmill on a Greek island.

Two musicians from Thessaloniki meet for an adventurous duo: Floros Floridis comes from Jazz and Improvisation, Babis Papadopoulos from Rock. Making music together they intermingle their roots, explore new ways of musical dialogue, discover melodies and "grooves". The result is a special mixture of improvised Jazz-Rock-Pop full of humour, anger and sometimes a certain melancholy. A reflection of our time.

This film diary accompanies the musicians during the eleven days in which they travel to the mill, they set up the recording location, discuss, rehearse, cook, laugh, play backgammon, ...make music.

„MOSCONI – OR TO WHOM THE WORLD BELONGS“ (2007)

Script and Direction: Jeanine Meerapfel

Camera: Malena Bystrowicz

Music: Floros Floridis

Editing: Paula Goldstein

Production: Malena Filmproduktion GmbH & Co KG in cooperation with Goethe Institut

Summary:

General Mosconi is a small town in the North of Argentina, rich with oil and gas. 1993 the state owned enterprise, YPF, that gave work, health care and education to the whole region, was privatised. The unemployment rate climbed to 70 percent, the whole infrastructure system collapsed. The town is an example for what is today understood as the loss of state and politics.
Today, the majority of people living there cannot even afford a bottle of gas (gas is the cheapest energy source in Argentina). Water is only available six hours a day and then it’s mostly polluted. All public institutions are basically shut down and offer services only sporadically.
The main characters of this film are members of the UTD, the union for unemployed workers in Mosconi. The press calls them „piqueteros“, they call themselves social workers. They have developed creative and unusual strategies of survival and ways of re-establishing the social network, that serve as a model for protest demonstrations throughout the country. This film is about their projects, their beliefs, their attitude towards life.

"YOU CANNOT WIN WITHOUT FIGHTING"

A documentary by Jeanine Meerapfel. 53 minutes. 2008

Script and Direction: Jeanine Meerapfel

Camera: Malena Bystrowicz

Editing: Andrea Wenzler/ Paula Goldstein

Music: Floros Floridis

TV-Editor: Sabine Rollberg

Production: Malena Filmproduktion GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin, in cooperation with ARTE/WDR.

Protagonists: José „Pepino“ Fernández, Juan Carlos „Gipi“ Fernández, Rodolfo „Chiqui“ Peralta, Inés Torres, Sandra Molina.

Originalversion spanish (that has at the moment german and/or french subtitles and a voice over in german or french). Digibeta and Betacam.

This is a personal trip to General Mosconi, a small town in the north of Argentina, rich with oil and gas. 1993 the state owned enterprise, YPF, that gave work, health care and education to the whole region, was privatised. The unemployment rate climbed to 70 percent, the whole infrastructure system collapsed.
Today, the majority of people living there cannot even afford a bottle of gas (gas is the cheapest energy source in Argentina). Water is only available six hours a day and then it’s mostly polluted. All public institutions are basically shut down and  offer services only sporadically.
 I went there to make a film-workshop on documentaries with members of the UTD, the union for unemployed workers in Mosconi. The press calls them „piqueteros“, they call themselves social workers. They have developed creative and unusual strategies of survival and ways of re-establishing the social network, that serve as a model for social movements throughout the country. They film themselves and I film them: their projects, their beliefs, their attitude towards life.