Gisela Tuchtenhagen: Heimkinder 1 - 3
The festival closes with three parts of
Heimkinder (1984-86) [Childen in Care Homes], by cinematographer and documentary director Gisela Tuchtenhagen. Decades into her career she even trained as a nurse. Shown on 16mm,
Heimkinder is a rare piece of television that lets us follow a daring experiment in social care caught on camera with a unique commitment and tenderness. A group of carers have literally decided to take off to take care, to take a group of male youths the care system has written off on a trip abroad to give them a glimpse of a different life. We are taken along, are pulled in close, as the carers and those they care for challenge each other and the care system.
12.30pm: Welcome and Introduction to
Heimkinder
12.45pm:
Heimkinder (1 - 3), Gisela Tuchtenhagen, West Germany, 1984-86, ca. 3 hours
4.00pm: Discussion in the round in the ICA Studio
The film will be shown with English subtitles.
Please note this screening takes place at the ICA.
We are pleased that throughout the festival, participants of the Waiting Times Project will share their responses and take part in our discussions about the films.
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the
Waiting Times Project opens up the relationship between time and care, exploring how lived experiences, representations and histories of delayed and impeded time shape and create experiences of care, including healthcare.
Heimkinder (Parts 1 - 3), Gisela Tuchtenhagen, West Germany, 1984-86, ca. 3 hours (57 min, 65 min, 43 min)
Heimkinder by cinematographer and filmmaker Gisela Tuchtenhagen (born 1943) is the document of an educational experiment and at the same time a cinematic experiment that, as a five-part series, made it into the evening programme of Northern German regional television (NDR) in the mid-1980s. On the one hand a reformist pedagogy taking the risk of an open-ended experiment and on the other hand a public television station that is prepared to go along with the project by caring to provide it with the necessary means of production. Neither seems imaginable today.
Progressive social workers at the Johannes-Peterson-Heim in Volksdorf /Hamburg keen to try out new ways of working with a group of notorious runaways, car thieves, and street kids written off by the education system and social authorities embark on said experiment accompanied by film graduate student Gisela Tuchtenhagen. Recognising the special knowledge of these young survival artists as well as their mistrust, brashness, fear, and restlessness already takes a lot of patience. To introduce some sort of stability into their lives - to teach them to read, write, do maths - takes even more, plus a lot of affection. Their method: not to stop the runaways’ urge to get away but to develop a travelling pedagogy from it, to create a mobile school with new teaching and learning practices.
Heimkinder thus also becomes a kind of road movie describing a trip to the Algarve in the south of Portugal, where, far from Germany, contradictions seem easier to reconcile. The journey poses an enormous challenge to everyone involved. Being near the sea helps, though things remain complicated, moods and attitudes change. All this is made visible through Tuchtenhagen’s considerate camera work, in which care as a cinematic method becomes palpable: to show concern for and about others, portrayed through respectful distance, and in this specific case to take the youths seriously and to portray them with an attitude that allows for their potential to shine through.
This attitude of care intrinsic to Tuchtenhagen’s approach may be explained by her being familiar with many of the young people's difficulties through her own experience. As a school dropout and runaway, with a stopover of several years in Paris, Tuchtenhagen succeeded, almost miraculously, in being accepted first at the Lette School for Photography and then at the DFFB (German Film and Television Academy Berlin). She later became known as a cinematographer, often working in collaboration with the documentary filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn, until she had enough and trained as a nurse. "My patients were happy because I took time for them," she explains in an interview in 2011, but also adds: ‘After five years in a hospital, you're used up.’ She then went back and continued her career as a cinematographer, filmmaker, and lecturer.
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