HOME SWEET HOME (2023)

Directed by Annika Mayer

Production: Jakob Krese, Annika Mayer/Majmun Films (Germany)

Feature Documentary (68 mins)

HOME SWEET HOME is a film about the invisibility of domestic violence.

Director Annika Mayer searches for clues, and interviews her grandmother ROSE about old family Super8 recordings from the 50s and 60s. They show a family in the time of the German “Economic Miracle”: a fancy house with a garden in a small German town, a vacation at the North Sea, a Sunday trip to the National Garden Show. These are images that have inscribed themselves in the collective memory of the Federal Republic; it is a social expectation that is captured on film - you record what you want to see.

But behind the facade, memories come up, fragments of a bygone era that still resonates. The film addresses the discrepancy between appearance and reality. Upon closer examination of the material, the doubts that are awakened in the viewers make the invisible visible. Through Rose’s narration, the image of post-war West German family happiness is dismantled piece by piece.