Anja Plaschg

An unexpected letter forces siblings Bernhard and Lydia to confront each other and to deal with their family history.

A single day: from the tender break of dawn to the darkest night. One out of many days to come? Quite possibly the very last. A long farewell, an ultimate goodbye to a life we have grown to hold dear. Leading to a head-on dive into a new reality, into a new state of being. To long for the unknown. To desire to be at the mercy of chance. Last caresses in solidarity, last minutes in shelter. End means beginning. Death becomes birth. From water, back into water. From gas to solid. Everything is commenced by woman, everything ends with a woman.

It’s not uncommon for a film to have a moving love story at its core. Yet this particular set-up is unusual. The lovers here are Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, both important representatives of post-war German-language poetry. The story of the relationship between the Austrian and the Jew from Czernowitz is told through their nearly 20-year correspondence (1948–1967). Or, more precisely, by a young woman and a young man reading from their letters in a studio in Vienna’s venerable Funkhaus.