When VON WEGEN "SCHICKSAL" (Is this Fate?) by Helga Reidemeister premiered in 1979, it triggered a controversy. Both the theme and the unadorned, partial depiction were something radically new in German post-war cinema. For some, it was provocative enough to make an almost two-hour long film about the everyday life of a single mother with all its impertinence. Today, it remains a valuable document in many ways: testifying to the emergence of a new generation of female filmmakers, as well as to politics and everyday life in 1970s West Berlin, but above all to its protagonist Irene Rakowitz and her attempt to resist a fate marked by daily violence and deprivation. The film's restored digital version will be shown for the first time on the occasion of the director's 75th birthday. (ah) (26.1.)
