Sechswochenamt

A touching film about coping with grief and Jacqueline Jansen’s feature film debut. Starring Magdalena Laubisch, Gerta Gormanns, and Lola Klamroth. Now playing at the Tilsiter Lichtspiele.

The death of her mother pulls the rug out from under LORE (25). As her inner world descends into an unprecedented state of turmoil, the outside world also falls apart. The COVID-19 pandemic breaks out, and a fog of isolation and loneliness settles over the small town in the Rhineland, where people degenerate into unempathetic loners. Lore loses her faith in community.

Amid all this, she preserves her mother’s life for posterity and struggles with all her might to find a way for them to say goodbye together. In doing so, she must confront the different ways of grieving within her family and the conventions that rain down on her like automatic reflexes.

The days and weeks pass, and it seems that Lore is beginning to live in an absurd symbiosis with the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic. As she gives up the rental apartment where she is staying one last time, she realizes that she can never return to the home of her childhood.

In a final burst of energy, she manages, against all odds, to organize a farewell ceremony. The fact that it takes place in her mother’s bedroom ultimately seems like an almost logical consequence of six weeks of a state of emergency. Six weeks during which Lore learns to allow herself to grieve so as not to be consumed by it. That the finitude of life must be planned for, and that there is no answer to the question: How does one grieve properly?

www.tilsiter-lichtspiele.de/sechswochenamt