FRG 1970 | Director, Script: Ingemo Engström | Camera: Bernd Fiedler | Cast: Edda Köchl, Ilona Schult, Irene Witter, Klara Zet, Stefan Agathos, Ingemo Engström, Lorraine Fernandez, Gerhard Theuring, Katrin Seybold | Sound: Gerhard Theuring | Production: HFF München | Colour | DCP | 92 min | german OV with english SUB | Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek

DARK SPRING, Ingemo Engström's graduation film at HFF Munich, was in the director's words "a film about women's love utopias". She was one of four women accepted into the first year of the directing programme at the newly founded film school in 1967.

"In a mixture of feature film elements and interview scenes, Engström takes stock of the already awakened women's movement. We see Katrin Seybold, who began making films the same year; Edda Köchl, married to Wim Wenders; Ilona Schult, already divorced from performance artist HA Schult. Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring also appear in front of the camera to stage the lives that they more or less led in Munich. [...]

Life, in the city and the significant wastelands on its outskirts, creeps through the cracks of her films. They take place in the rooms of the communes, with their LPs, mattresses spread out across the floors, posters on the walls, and outdoor areas. There the residents tried to create a practically Situationist space for themselves, in the midst of still-conservative society. DARK SPRING is filmed very close to life and also shows many outdoor shots of Munich. Cars drive through the wide streets, there are hardly any cyclists, the cityscape is dominated by pedestrians. It was a decelerated, slow world. Even the underground didn't exist back then, so that social life required close forms of living together – communes, day-care centres, self-awareness groups, meeting places." (Dunja Bialas, artechock.de, 2019)