Famine years

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Movie
German title Famine years
Original title Famine years
Country of production FRG
original language German
Publishing year 1980
length 114 min. Minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Jutta Brückner
script Jutta Brückner
production Jutta Brückner-Filmproduktion in coproduction with ZDF
music Johannes Schmoelling
camera Jörg Jeshel , Rainer March
cut Anneliese Krigar
occupation

Hunger Years is an autobiographical drama by filmmaker Jutta Brückner from 1980.

action

13-year-old Ursula Scheuner is growing up as the only child of a middle-class family in post-war Germany of the Adenauer era. Increasingly, puberty leads girls into conflicts with their parents and their surroundings. National Socialism robbed them of their youth. Now these people are trying to forget and make up for their lost years. Ursula is confronted with the political indecision and the private lies of her father, the iron will to consume, the great need to catch up and the fearful sexual hostility of her mother. Especially the relationship with her is a burden for Ursula. Ursula never wants to be like this mother, who herself has not experienced what a female subject can be capable of and wants to shape her daughter according to her own ideal.

Ursula feels the deepest longing for liberation from this bourgeois narrowness and seeks her salvation with her peers, but ends up in dangerous situations. Their struggles for identity, self-protection and recognition lead them to emotional limits. When the distance between inner feelings and external circumstances becomes too great, the only thing left for her is to flee inward, into the emotion-flattening speechlessness.

The situation comes to a head when she meets a young black man and spends a night with him at a lake. When he reveals to her that he has to leave the next morning, Ursula again falls into deep depression and doesn't know how she can go on living now. The film tells the story of a girl who is about to grow up and doesn't know how.

background

“Hunger Years” is an autobiographical film - many of its motifs go back to personal experiences in Jutta Brückner's life. Nevertheless, he does not describe a single case, but the experiences of a whole generation of young girls during the restoration period in the Federal Republic. The greater the external wealth, the more pressing the hidden mental hunger. The film intends to disclose the dressing that self-dressed mothers make to their daughters. The basic question of "Hunger Years" is the following: "How can one live inside and outside at the same time?" His central message at the end is "If you want to do something, you have to do something, yourself." To do this, Ursula's photos are burned. This does not mean that the girl's suicide attempt was successful, but rather follows Goethe's sentence: "And as long as you can do not have, this: Die and become! Are you only a gloomy guest on the dark earth. "

reception

“The stringency of the film comes from the rigor of the chosen perspective: following the traces of the 50s from the visible to the invisible, into the scarring of an individual to the wounds of the subject who has to suffer history. 'Years of Hunger' shows with accuracy and authenticity the pressing seams between the external history of an era and the internal history of an individual, as it rarely occurs in a film about this time. The story of the girl who is bent over in time so that she cannot become a woman, the story of economic growth and loss of emotions, of gluttony and fear of life are parts of a more general story and it is the quality of the film that it turns these parts against each other without that he instrumentalizes individual history as a mere example, as an illustration. "

Gertrud Koch

"A bitter, brittle and at the same time very beautiful film that captures memories very precisely - also collective memories of a girl's youth in the 1950s in Germany."

Basler newspaper

Awards

  • International Film Critics' Prize (Fipresci), Berlinale 1980
  • German Film Critics' Prize 1981, various audience awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for years of hunger . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , November 2004 (PDF; test number: 100 323 V / DVD).