Home for the Weekend

From time to time Marko makes the journey from Berlin to a provincial town in southern Germany where his parents live in a large house with a swimming pool and a big garden. His father, a once successful publisher, is now retired and working on a book entitled ‘Motifs and Narrative Strategies of the Assyrians and the Sumerians’. He is about to embark on a research trip to the Middle East. Marko’s mother, who is suffering from depression, is to stay at home. Thankfully there’s another son, Jakob. Dad financed his dental practice. Although Jakob doesn’t have many patients and is largely saddled with debts, he will at least be able to keep an eye on Mum while Dad’s away.

And so they come together for one of their family weekends. Mum begins by announcing that she’s stopped taking her pills. A short while later she disappears. Everyone panics; they scour the neighbourhood and call the police. But, after a while, they begin to face up to a life without Mum.

An astute and sensitive family portrait that nonetheless retains a certain critical distance as it describes a web of mistrust, deceit and betrayal. A study of our fear of the truth – and about the vestiges of an ostensibly perfect family unit. –Berlinale