Lichter

Ingo tries everything he can to save his ailing mattress store. Philip, a young architect from the West, wants to rekindle his relationship with his Polish girlfriend. Antoni, a Polish taxi driver, desperately tries to raise money for his daughter's communion dress. The Ukrainian refugee family he takes in for a small fee is cheated by a smuggler. Sonja, the German interpreter, also wants to bring a Ukrainian to the West. Hans-Christian Schmid tells these and many other stories in his film “Lichter” (Lights), which is set on both sides of the Oder River, in Frankfurt and Slubice, Poland.

Some of these fates intersect, others stand alone. Schmid interweaves the episodes, picking up plot threads to loosely connect them or simply drop them. None of the stories has even the slightest hint of a conciliatory ending; they remain as open as the biographies of the people they tell about, and as unfinished as the contemporary historical developments in which they are embedded.

Director Schmid succeeds in weaving together a situation of political upheaval with the existential hardships and experiences of individual people—without reducing these fates to mere examples of a historical moment. The film reflects in an artfully unspectacular way on the everyday nature of an exceptional situation—in a region that has been shaped not only by