Anduni - Fremde Heimat

What is home? Is it a place? The place of mother tongue and tradition? The place of self-realization or family? When her father dies, the young Cologne native Belinda (Irina Potapenko) is drawn more and more into the burlesque world of her Armenian family, which she was never really interested in before. But the more comfortable she feels here, the more she moves away from her student life and her boyfriend Manuel (Florian Lukas). Belinda embarks on a journey between security and instability, freedom and confinement. Slowly, the search for a home develops, involving half the family - and Manuel too. “Samira Radsi's Anduni is an astonishingly generous feature film debut; her previous work on daily soaps will not have prepared the director for this. She and screenwriter Karin Kaçi show respect for all the different views of life that clash here. They allow opposing perspectives to be equally valid: Every accusation is followed by a cogent rejoinder. The script and editing play carefully with the correspondence of feelings, motifs and props. Their greatest concern is to bring together the supposedly irreconcilable, the spheres between which Belinda's life is torn. In the end, she embarks on the search that her father had abandoned. Together with her aunt and uncle, she sets off for the place that connects what is not connected. In Armenia, the camera's gaze changes. It now widens to long shots that are impressed, but not overwhelmed, by the monumentality of Yerevan's architecture and the majesty of nature. There, in the lost homeland, the aunt speaks her second most beautiful sentence of dialog: “I've never been so far from home.” (Gerhard Midding, on: epd-film.de)