Dir. Thanh Nguyen Phuong
Germany, 2018
10 minutes
German with English subtitles
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In
Sorge 87, Thanh Nguyen Phuong uses animated fabric prints to remember the contract workers who came to East Germany from Vietnam. Two couples, one Vietnamese and one German, look back at the time when they lived together in the small town of Werdau in Saxony. Sorge (which means worry or sorrow in German) was the name of the neighbourhood where the filmmaker lived with her parents as a child. In 1987, several new buildings were constructed there to house Vietnamese textile workers. For these newcomers, everyday life in East Germany played out between this residential district, the language school, and the factory, and was accompanied by cultural misunderstandings and difficulties in adapting from the outset. And yet this world also included a cinema showing Vietnamese films that were not dubbed into German.
The filmmaker went on to create an interactive documentation project (which can be found at
sorge87.de) with additional interviews, images and texts to accompany her autobiographically inspired short film.
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