Katharina and Peter meet by chance in Montenegro and proceed to fall in love: She is a television journalist in her parents' homeland whilst he, ostensibly on vacation there, is in reality on a very personal search for clues. The melodramatic love story that results unfolds against the backdrop of a beautiful landscape and the background of German history.
It is Katharina who first notices the slightly lost-looking man walking along the winding roads. She flirts with him between work on a television segment, shows him the surrounding landscape and small towns over the coming days and, ultimately, seduces him. For the career woman, it is an unforeseen experience that beautifully slows down the otherwise breakneck speed at which she rushes through life. She is even willing to postpone her plans for a job in New York for a few days. And yet as much as this daughter of so-called guest workers and German itinerant traveller duo are attracted to one another, the past and Germany would appear to stand insurmountably between them.
A sensitively captured film that simultaneously speaks of the long shadows of German history, of home and multiple affiliations, as well as of the longing for love and the Eros of the Other.
Text: Lea Wohl von Haselberg
Credits
original title Die Verliebten
international title Die Verliebten
german title Die Verliebten
JFBB section KINO FERMISHED
country/countries BRD
year 1987
duration 95
Jeanine Meerapfel
BIO In her works, director Jeanine Meerapfel not only deals with her own German-Argentinean family biography, but also finds a language through her films with which she expresses feelings of not belonging and questions about her own identity and origins. She was born in 1943 as the daughter of German-Jewish emigrants in the Argentinian capital Buenos Aires. After completing her studies in journalism, she came to Germany in 1964. She completed her studies at the Institute for Film Design in Ulm. Against the backdrop of current political and social debates, Jeanine Meerapfel's films are still highly topical today: themes such as migration, experiences of flight and exile find their way into her films, as does a critical examination of the acute dangers of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. The films are political, but not sober political cinema. Rather, they are very personal examinations of history, which are always in a highly emotional interrelationship with Meerapfel's own family history.
