Weil du mir gehörst (2019)

Former couple Julia and Tom are back in court after their divorce: the issue is custody of their eight-year-old daughter, Anni. During the child’s hearing in the case, Anni’s estrangement from her father becomes clear. How did things come to this? Immediately after the divorce, things still look different. They agreed to joint custody, with Anni continuing to live with her mother and spending every other weekend with her father, whom she loves very much. Tom has a new partner, who also has a daughter, and since Anni gets along well with both of them, something like a new family begins to form on the weekends. But Julia is still deeply hurt by the separation, which Tom initiated. As a result, it seems that Tom is no longer keeping his arrangements with his daughter, something little Anni cannot understand. Her mother offers her explanations: it is because of Tom’s work and his new family, who now need all of their father’s time. In reality, however, Tom repeatedly finds himself standing in front of a locked door when he comes to pick Anni up from her mother’s home. Julia now does nothing but accuse him of being bad for Anni and say that it is his own fault the family broke apart. In fact, Julia is trying to bind her daughter more closely to herself and push Tom out of Anni’s life with the help of her lawyer, Martin Wolters. The conflict escalates further and further, increasingly upsetting Anni. When Tom makes another attempt to pick Anni up, he discovers that Julia has moved with Anni near her own parents, uprooting the child from her circle of friends as well as forcing her to adjust to a new school. Julia gives her daughter a new phone, supposedly with the new number Tom has had for a short time already saved in it. But Anni’s attempts to get in touch with her father by phone are unsuccessful. The child does not know that her calls are going to a second phone belonging to her mother. Julia also manages, by underhanded means and with her lawyer’s help, to secure a three-month ban on contact between father and daughter. The period includes a long-planned trip to the Red Sea to go diving, which Anni had been looking forward to very much. Since Tom is not allowed to contact his daughter at all, he cannot tell her that the trip with Anni can no longer go ahead. Julia, who knows perfectly well what is going on, pretends instead that Tom has forgotten Anni because of his new family. On what is supposedly the day of departure, she drives with the child to Tom’s house and, of course, finds the doors locked. Ignoring her child’s distress, she acts as if she had arranged an appointment with Tom and even waits with her daughter outside the house for an hour. Back home, Anni throws away her diving mask and smashes her phone, the supposed link to her father. When Julia is forced to allow contact between father and daughter again after the three months have passed, she tells the child that her father now wants to see her again, after not having been in touch for three months. The reunion is a fiasco. Ms. Gärtner from the youth welfare office advises Tom to look up the technical term PAS. Helplessly, Tom realizes that he has virtually no way to defend himself against his ex-wife’s lies. Julia does not even hesitate to accuse him of having taken inappropriate photos of Anni. His despair is written all over his face as he tells his new partner Jenny, resignedly, that his ex-wife is throwing him out of his daughter’s life; he is now just a source of money, but no longer a father. It turns out that the supposed psychotherapist Britta Waibel is actually only an alternative practitioner, and that she has repeatedly worked with the opposing lawyer, with her so-called expert reports always coming down in favor of that lawyer’s client. Anni tells Doris Jahn, the therapist now appointed by the court, in words that do not sound like a child’s at all, why she no longer wants to see her father. This time Julia actually prevails: she is granted sole custody of Anni. When Julia receives another summons to court, because Tom does not want to give up his child, she once again manipulates her daughter, imposing her own point of view on her. However, the hearing now scheduled before the Higher Regional Court takes a different turn than Julia, in particular, had expected. The judge orders the parents to pull together for the child’s sake and re-establish contact with each other through counseling sessions. A decision on custody of Anni will be made only after a three-month period. When Anni is then brought to her father by her mother, she tells him she is there only because she has to be, and so her mother will not get into trouble. She rebuffs her father’s attempts to connect by disappearing into her room and closing the door behind her.