"You were never a mother to me", Rita accuses her mother Isabella in the course of the film. But how is the young woman dealing with her own children? Most of the time she leaves them with the hated Isabella. In the end she does attempt to lead a kind of family life with Marc, a US soldier stationed in Germany.
"The Days Between" is the name of Maria Speth's directorial debut about a young vagabond in Berlin. The hero of her second film continues this drifting movement, and like the first young woman, this one doesn't let her existence be determined by common ideas of value and morals either. Speth's film has as much a mind of its own as does the heroine herself. But this is not a film about the psychologizing question of why a mother continues to bring new children into the world despite the fact that she doesn't want to take responsibility for them. Rather, what is sketched is the biography of a young woman who insists on her right to refusal, and who prefers to meander through life free as a bird. The film makes it clear that we don’t always have to understand a person in order to get closer to him or her.
Anke Leweke
Production: Pandora Film, Cologne; Cinework, Basel; Les Films du fleuve, Liège
Screenplay: Maria Speth
Cinematographer: Reinhold Vorschneider
Editor: Dietmar Kraus, Ludo Troch, Dörte Volz-Mammarella, Maria Speth
Cast: Sandra Hüller, Olivier Gourmet, Susanne Lothar, Luisa Sappelt, Gerti Drassel, Coleman Orlando Swinton
Format: 35mm (shot on 16mm), Color
Running time: 120 minutes
Languages: German, French, English
