Souvenir

If Jorge Luis Borges had been a West German filmmaker, a film of his would have looked something like this: Alfred Diebold, a member of the SPD, a representative of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a Swabian cosmopolitan, a would-be actor and a romantic wanderer, disappeared one day into the eternal ice. At least, that is what the narrative voice of a friend reports, who now sets out to reconstruct a life story from the 400 video cassettes that Diebold filled over the course of his life with home movies and recordings of his political work. Among other things, the film features comical scenes from the election campaign, holiday snaps from a safari and moving conversations with his girlfriend, who is suffering from cancer. The film takes an oblique approach, clever and with multiple layers of meaning. Why document one’s own life? Perhaps because, at some point, one exists only in the recordings one has left behind. (P.H.)