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Director: Hellmut Mario Fulss Vega

A few years after the fall of the Wall. The bitter socialist Robert Lekroucha (62) lives with his son Vladimir (13) in the East German province. After an unexpected inheritance, he has taken up a young woman’s job ad and invited her to work for him as a domestic servant.

But when Irma Freimars appears at his place, things are not as they should be either. Irma comes from the hated West, is not a young woman, wears a cross around her neck and drinks sour Riesling!

Out of a socialist reflex, he hires her anyway. But soon Robert is annoyed by her French food and her religiosity. Just like his son, who prefers to read his father’s old diaries, in which he relives his first erotic experiences with full concentration.

But little by little Irma manages to get closer to both Vladimir and Robert. The two existences, each failed in their own way, gradually become closer and Robert even finds the strength to get the farm going again together with his old LPG comrades. But when his friend Paul is fatally injured in an accident, Robert, full of guilt, falls into his old lethargy.

When Irma decides to turn her back on the madness of the village and return to her native Baden, father and son travel after her and are finally able to convince her to return to the East.

IRMA FREIMARS (57) lost everything in the West. Her great love, her drunken father’s wretchedly bad winery – and her faith. With nothing but a pile of debts, she takes the job. Robert is quickly annoyed by Irma’s whimsicality and her penchant for extensive dinners. Her very presence, her otherness, disturbs his unhappiness. He and also his seemingly lost son Vladimir, who is already annoyed by his own name, watch her and her actions very closely. Despite her unusual behavior for them, Irma begins to have an effect on them. Reminiscing about the vanished times, Robert and his old comrades begin to repair the buildings of the liquidated LPG. When Robert’s best friend is killed in a tractor accident, he falls back into his old lethargy and bitterness. Irma has long since made new friends. Beneath the quiet surface of the village, other detached souls are bustling about. With their clear and unorthodox ways, they impress Irma. For the first time in her life, she may have found a place where she wants to stay – in the middle of nowhere!

In the boozy MATHILDE (60), the former bookkeeper of the LPG, she finds a friend who, unlike most of the men in town, has kept her perspective. And Robert also reawakens from his grief and for the first time dives into a world beyond his previous boundaries:

In a nightclub run by German-Polish SVETLANA (38) – who doesn’t like to speak German and is in love with former punk Willi (43), who runs the only pub in town and looks a bit like David Bowie – and weird Poles, Vietnamese and black East Germans, he lets himself drift for the first time since his youth and afterwards has the rush he needs to reveal himself to Irma as he once was. But the ghosts of the past can’t be shaken off so easily….

Cast

Barbara Auer

(German Television Award – Best Actress 2020)

Born in 1959 in Constance on Lake Constance, she studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Hamburg until 1981 and then acted in theater for several years. In her feature films, she worked with renowned directors such as Christian Pätzold and Hermine Huntgeburth (including “Effi,” “Yella”) and received several awards, most recently in 2020 with the German Television Award for Best Actress in the three-part television series “Preis der Freiheit.

Thomas Thieme

(Babylon Berlin)

Born in Weimar, Thuringia, in 1948, Thieme studied at the renowned
at the renowned Erst Busch drama school in East
East Berlin and left the GDR in 1984 by applying to leave the

GDR. Since then, he has appeared in countless plays, cinema and television
and television films, as well as series and radio plays. Most recently

in the series “Babylon Berlin” and “Perfume”, as well as in the cinema films
the feature films “Wilhelm Tell” and “Max und die Wilde 7”.
In 2020 he was awarded the Askania Award for his life’s work.
awarded

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Kamran Sardar Khan

Freier Produzent bei East End Film GmbH

This project is a collaboration between East End Film and freelance producer Kamran Sardar Khan.

Khan has been working in the film business since 2001 after his first career as an architect. He first co-founded the film distribution company Academy Films with Stefan Paul and Camino Film with Thomas Reisser in 2009. Khan has released over 100 films and has become an ambassador for cinema, a discoverer of new talent and a great supporter of local film talent. Khan’s focus is on finding inspiring, intelligent, character-driven and humanistic material.

That is cinema. For me.

Emotionally showing structures.

People who transcend their own

their own boundaries.

Opening up. Then poetry emerges.

The truth is whimsical.

– Helmut Mario Fulss Vega –

Writer and Director

Hellmut Mario Fulss Vega was born in Santiago de Chile and spent the first years of his life there. At the beginning of the eighties he immigrated to Germany with his parents and siblings and graduated from high school here. He then studied “Applied Theater Studies” in Giessen and earned his diploma with a thesis on the theater of Robert Wilson and Heiner Müller.

Confronted as a youth in Chile with the Pinochet dictatorship and in Germany with a country divided into East and West, he dealt with the conflict between a socialist utopia and a real existing capitalism in both home countries.

Always in close contact with his relatives in Dresden and East Berlin and often visiting them, he gained experience in both German states and felt himself to be an all-German even before the fall of the Wall. At the same time, the topic of capitalism/socialism has not let go of him until today.

Director's Statement

“IRMA grew up in provincial West Germany. Neglected by her parents who were preoccupied with themselves, she fled into the world of the Catholic Church. Her only great love was a Catholic priest who hung himself. Her attempt to find her harmony with the world as a nun in a convent failed miserably. All she has left of Catholicism in the end is her admiration for Hildegard of Bingen, an early icon of the women’s movement from the 11th century. She is her only “friend.”

ROBERT grew up in the East German province. As an adolescent, he lost his one great love, Vera, when she ran away to the West with her parents just before the Wall was built. Disappointed and embittered, he also fled – to the Free German Youth and the party. Robert spent his life trying to find and live the good and right things in the GDR. He was a good LPG leader, a “deserving member” of socialist society. After the fall of the GDR, his life collapsed. In the last third of their lives, Irma and Robert meet in reunified Germany. Two failed people, you could say.

As a director, I want to tell an emotional and unusual love story in a place no one else is interested in – about people no one else is interested in. A story not only about a woman and a man, but also about two women who become close as if they were meant for each other. Irma finds a friend and companion in MATHILDE, the former accountant of the LPG. Having grown up in the different systems of the FRG and the GDR, both women have drawn similar conclusions. Less bitter than the men, we learn truths through their conversations that would otherwise remain hidden. They are a little older, but their wisdom, solidarity and affection, point to a younger future!
The time of the noughties was marked by violence against minorities, which already existed during the GDR, but were always marginalized, as if they did not really belong. And even more so after the end of the GDR. In the nightclub, a few kilometers away, they got together. SVETLANA, half Polish, half German, has created here an ensemble of Vietnamese piano players, black East Germans and Polish LGBTQ+. A commune of “others.” WILLI, former GDR punk and the only landlord in town, feels at home here. Through him, Robert also enters this other sphere – and experiences a world that encourages him to find himself again.

Also to find again to his son, who lives lonely before himself. VLADIMIR from 2001, with his rather bleak prospects, could be an AFD voter today. He could have succumbed to the pressure of neo-Nazi groups from East and West. In this film, there will be a different path for him in the end. Fortunately, he has his father’s old diaries from the GDR’s founding years. But not everyone is that lucky….

Born and raised in Chile, with my two home countries Chile and Germany, both of which were marked by a similar social conflict between left and right, I have been dealing with the topic of ideological division in these two countries since our family fled the Chilean military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.

For VERAS TONGUE IN MY MOUTH FULL OF PRALINE I have
I had many conversations with contemporary witnesses and also long conversations with my own family in Dresden and Berlin. With Barbara Auer as a chronicler of the later post-war period in the FRG and Thomas Thieme and Katrin Sass as contemporary witnesses of what happened in the GDR, I have outstanding actors who support me with their expertise. I want to make a film in which people behave as if they were teenagers experiencing the feeling of love for the first time. Insecure, clueless, awkward, comical.

My cinematic narrative style is influenced by Pedro Almodóvar (Volver), Aki Kaurismäki (Fallen Leaves), Wolfgang Becker (Good By Lenin), Federico Fellini (I Vitelloni), Hermine Huntgeburth (Lindenberg! Do Your Thing), Konrad Wolf (Solo Sunny), Jiří Menzel (Sharply Observed Trains), Miloš Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’ s Nest & The Fireman’ s Ball), and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation).
All people must be visible in our narratives. Barbara Auer, Thomas Thieme, Katrin Sass, Jens Harzer, Aleksandra Szwed, Antonia Fulss and Julia Jentsch stand for that! This is also what my producers Kamran Sardar Khan, Elaine Niessner and Tommy Niessner from EAST END FILM stand for – with their claim to track down socially relevant issues and tell them emotionally. A great enrichment for me!”

Veras Tongue in my mouth full of pralines