Director Uli Decker films a family secret: Her father wore women's clothes and accessories at times throughout his life in order to feel a sense of belonging to the opposite sex. He did this secretly, plagued by feelings of guilt, as such behaviour was generally considered monstrous. It was only on his deathbed that his daughter found out. So she sets out to discover her father's hidden history and interweaves it with her own biography, which is also marked by the rejection of heteronormative order. The result is a tender, very personal film that nevertheless says everything necessary about the harshness of moral and social convention.

Uli Decker's relationship with her father Helmut is already addressed in the first scenes: throughout her childhood it was distant, not very familiar, a melancholy lay over her family life in the Upper Bavarian town of Murnau. There was no tangible problem, on the outside the Deckers seemed like a prime example of the happy bourgeois family. But on the inside it was noticeable that the father was carrying a burden that no one but him knew about.
The director interviews her mother, who tells in gentle Bavarian that it was a secret that made him unhappy. She herself finally discovered it after years of marriage, but kept it to herself, in accordance with the father's wishes. It was only on his deathbed that the daughters Cordula and Ulrike found out. In the film, the sisters talk about the situation at the time and both agreed: they were not shocked by the content of the secret, but by the fact that their father never trusted them enough to talk about it.
In the picture you can see personal things, the Deckers' flat, cardboard boxes from the father's estate, albums with family photos. The pictures are narrow, concentrated on details, but in between they change into brightly coloured handicrafts: Uli Decker assembles tear-outs from photos and paintings, sequences from old commercials and news reports, which gradually comment on the story of a hidden transgender life in increasingly wild collages. For in the boxes are pumps, skirts, wigs that belonged to her father. He wore them when no one saw him.
That's how you learn about his secret. Soon, excerpts from his diaries are read aloud. They are difficult, angst-filled accounts, of a childhood in which Helmut Decker secretly put on his mother's clothes; of an adult life in which he changed his clothes in the forest and then strolled through small towns as a woman - always in fear that someone might catch him. For this is also visible through the collages: the social understanding of gender is clearly divided, whether it is the 1950s or the 1990s. There are women. And there are men. There is nothing else.
There are two complicating factors for the father. He is a strict Catholic, and he lives in Bavaria, which is not famous for tolerance. So he considers himself deviant and keeps his desire for women's clothing a secret throughout, in youth, at work, in marriage. At the point in his life when he already had a family, Uli Decker then sets in again - now with her own story. Even as a child, she was not the daughter her father wanted, was never satisfied with being a girl. She looked closely at who was allowed to experience adventures, and those were only people with beards. She would have liked to have one like that, her career aspiration was "Pope", she was in love with a teacher.
Between family photos and interviews with her mother and sister, there is enough space in ANIMA for the astonishment that fills Uli Decker to this day. Her father, of all people, should have understood her. He of all people knew the difficulty with gender stereotypes. But he didn't see it, she says, he didn't help. Because of such statements, the film sometimes becomes a little bitter, or also because the central question of who this father was, who never really revealed himself, remains unanswered. He died in an accident, unexpectedly, without ever revealing anything to her.
But there is enough humour in the way Uli Decker interweaves the stories, enough honesty in the answers of mother and sister. The questions, the assumptions, the fantasy of the pictures are a declaration of love through which one gets an insight into a Bavarian family that is different from the way Bavarian families are usually presented. This arouses curiosity and amusement for the viewer - above all, in the end, it awakens the realisation of how few possibilities society leaves to those who deviate from the simple norm.

Doris Kuhn (06.04.2023)

Reviews and Commentary:

"About six years ago I decided to make a documentary film (about my family history). It was a time when Bavarian schools were discussing whether pupils should be confronted with other ways of life, other identities. Many argued as if all Bavarian children were constructed as strictly cis hetero in a factory, and you would give them bad ideas if you told them that you can also feel differently. So I thought, I'll have to tell them what can happen behind the façade of a completely normal Bavarian family." (Uli Decker in SR Talk, 28.02.2022)

"It was important to me to also interpret this behaviour (wearing opposite-sex clothing) as a reaction to social circumstances and thus to question these circumstances." (Uli Decker in „Deutschlandfunk Kultur“, 15. 10. 2022)

"Uli Decker works through the history of her family and its secrets and thus her own growing up as a non-gender-conforming person. Also her stylistically idiosyncratic examination was one of the impressive contributions to the 43rd Max Ophüls Film Festival." (taz)

"Uli Decker takes the memories she has from her childhood and youth as well as the stories and images from her father's life and puts them together anew, retells the family story, tries to form a new picture of what was - what really was. ... The view is always a narrow one, a slice of life, which makes it clear: this is only a part of what the experienceable reality is, only one angle, one point of view." (Sissy)

Awards:

2022 Max Ophüls Preis – Best Documentary
2022 Max Ophüls Audience Award Documentary
2022 Achtung Berlin: Award of the Ecumenical Jury
2022 Achtung Berlin: Best Documentary
2022 International Documentary Filmfestival Thessaloniki: WIFT Award (Women in Film and Television)

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

2019-2021

Production Year

2022

color

color + b/w

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Documentary

Genre

Biography / Portrait

Topic

Relationship / Family, LGBTIQ / Queer, Home, Psychology

Available Media

DCP, Blu-ray Disc, DVD

Original Version

German (de)

DCP

Subtitles

English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Croatian (hr)

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Croatian (hr)

DVD

Subtitles

German (partly), German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Croatian (hr)