Ostkreuz

The final screening of the On Location series, which has over the last eleven months presented films shot on location in Berlin at different moments in time from 1929 to 2019, turns its attention to Michael Klier’s OSTKREUZ. The film is set in a dreary reception camp in the wintry, washed-out no-man’s land between East and West. This is where the 15-year-old Elfie (Laura Tonke in her first role) and her mother (Suzanne von Borsody) are now stranded having fled from East Germany; this is where the duo’s ideas about what the future should look like start to diverge. While the mother is willing to escape the dismal, cramped conditions of the container in which they’re housed by way of a drastic decision, the obstinate Elfie gets involved in small-scale crime in order to scrape together 3000 marks to put down a deposit on an apartment. As they move through wastelands, ruins and landscapes ripe for demolition, they cross pass with the dodgy Darius (Miroslaw Baka) as well as the adolescent Edmund (Steffan Cammann). (Milena Gregor)