Jutta Brückner Filmproduktion

Hungerjahre is a movie about adolescence in 1950s West Germany, in which director and scriptwriter Jutta Brückner comes to terms with her own memories.

Berlin 1808. A young, immature student who considers himself a poet, August Varnhagen, enters the famous salon of Rahel Levin, one of the first assimilated Jewish women of the Romantic period. He has heard of this woman who was praised by all for her wit and wisdom and he comes because he seeks connection and relations and in this salon the most famous men of the time crowded.

"Brides of Nothingness: Female Terror." What connects Magda Goebbels with Ulrike Meinhof? - Both women represent a different side of modernity: continuity and fractures of a female mentality story in which the unconscious of history is sedimented. The fanaticism of both women was a publicly lived love story with politics.

A portrait of a woman’s life between 1915 and 1975. In Jutta Brückner’s documentary, her mother looks back at the 60 years of her life, talking about her father’s early accidental death, the constraints faced by a lower middle-class family of five, her training as a seamstress, marriage to a bookkeeper committed to social democratic ideals, the privations of war, and not least of all, her later realisation that fear may have caused her to miss opportunities … An ingenious collage of picture and sound accompanies the mother’s narrative, a tapestry of proverbs, pop songs, marching music, and the noise of war. Hundreds of photographs – most selected from August Sander’s (1876–1964) project “People of the 20th Century”, alongside newer photos by Abisag Tüllmann, among others – lend the individual vita of the director’s mother a kind of ontological validity. Images of labourers and office workers, excursions and marches, imbue what we hear with references that transcend the personal.

It's a perfectly ordinary day in Rita's life: early in the morning her lover from last night left the apartment, and Rita doesn't dare to go back to work after she stole money in the telephone cabin the day before.