Tamara (2023)

Two women—mother Barbara and daughter Tamara—both come from East Germany, though one experienced it and the other did not, since Tamara was born in 1990. After a long absence, Tamara returns to her hometown in Brandenburg to visit for her father Karl’s milestone birthday. Her parents have given up their thirty-year fight over the plot of land on which their family home stands. The property was restituted after reunification under the rules governing unresolved property claims, but they built the house with their own hands and with help from friends. The new owners have already sold the land, and her parents, who did not want to take out a loan to buy it themselves, are already sorting through their belongings in preparation for moving out. During this time, Tamara meets her childhood friend Rico, who is now a building contractor and holds line-dancing evenings at the town’s former cultural center. Tamara’s mother, Barbara, ran the center until reunification. Within just a few days, everything Tamara has always known as security, home, or even a sense of belonging falls apart: her father Karl is killed in a traffic accident on the autobahn. In the weeks that follow, Tamara and her mother Barbara struggle with their relationship, which cannot be separated from the social changes through which the family “came into being, grew, and fell apart,” as the film’s website puts it. It turns out that Rico bought the land. He plans to demolish the house and had already commissioned tree-clearing work in the garden before Karl died, so the felling begins at the worst possible time. Rico later apologizes to Tamara. Barbara and Tamara now have to clear the house and carry the belongings of an entire married and family life out onto the street. An assessment is commissioned to determine the compensation Barbara will receive; as a cemetery gardener and former head of the cultural affairs office, she can expect only a small pension. And the house’s value, which was supposed to provide for her old age, has been lost through the restitution of the land—yet the payment is small: “It’ll at least cover the funeral—with flowers and cake,” her mother comments. Mother and daughter gradually grow close again, too. Tamara accompanies Barbara to the pension office, since Barbara finds it difficult to cope with the bureaucratic process required to apply for a widow’s pension. There, Tamara learns that Karl was not her biological father. She is furious about the lie, but as the two continue clearing out the house together, she listens to recordings her father made on tape. He was a sound technician and, from the time Tamara was born, had recorded and kept diary-like tapes in his basement studio. This allows her to come to terms with some of the past: she receives it through her father’s voice and learns to see it through his eyes. At the end of the film, after Karl’s ashes are buried at sea, Tamara and Barbara walk through an autobahn rest stop and talk about how the lie about Tamara’s origins came about. Barbara explains that it happened to protect their own life stories from being interpreted, and to give Tamara a story of her own, “and we wanted it to be true.” The story has substantial autobiographical elements from director and screenwriter Jonas Ludwig Walter, whose (non-biological) father died in a traffic accident in 2013.