D 1979, D, SC Recha Jungmann, C Rüdiger Laske, Marian Czura, E Ilona Grundmann, Esther Dayan, M Frank Wolff, S Margit Eschenbach, Peter Klemens, Gerhard Waal, P Spree-Jungmann, Cast Simone Maul, Anja Burak, Hermann Schäfer, Recha Jungmann and the inhabitants of Welkers, Print colour, DCP from 16mm, 72 min, German OV , Deutsches Filminstitut – DIF e.V.

Guest: Recha Jungmann

Recha Jungmann articulates the story that hurts her, in images. It’s a self-interrogation into home, the past, the rescued present, which aren’t part of her. She must reconstruct them from the ruins of the fragmented house of her childhood. Welkers, a village in the Rhön Mountains. A young girl of perhaps seven tiptoes and skips through the deserted house, lingers at open doors, roams through bushes to the stream. A teenager, maybe seventeen, with curious steps and a cautious tread, inspects now-useless objects in the house. Old magazines, postcards, photos from which one blows the dust until the faded happiness of better times appears. [...] The house fell apart after the war. But it was Fascism that destroyed it, by calling the father to war and labelling the grandfather an outsider for voting ‘No’ in 1933. In losing him, the village lost its spiritual centre; despite him, it consummated its connexion to the Greater German Empire. [...] Etwas tut weh is a film between genres. For one thing, there’s the highly subjective investigation of the past; for another, the flipside of that subjectivity: the plunge into the worst objectivity [...] a film that gently and insistently stimulates the five senses to politically grasp the history that is inscribed on the body. (Karsten Witte, Politik am eigenen Leib. Zu Recha Jungmanns Film Etwas tut weh, 1980)