Insult (Kerben in der Seele)
Gertraud Schwarz, AT 2016, documentary, 93 min, 16 : 9, color, stereo
One World Film Festival Romania screened Insult for it's World premiere in March 2017 www.oneworld.ro
Voices from the festival audience:
"It really touched me. Not only in my mind, but also my body reacted."
"I find it very courageous to make such a quiet film about domestic abuse!"
"It is interesting, that the film focusses on people from the middle class. Normally when it comes to topics like this you always see people from the lower end of the socio-economic hierarchy."
"To me the film is not so much about the insults themselves, but it is a film about the things that lie behind the masks of society. They all live in these beautiful homes, but inside, in their minds, there are these painful memories."
"I think the film reminds people to reflect on their own unsolved issues and maybe to try and find a solution for them. - But of course a lot of people do not want to be reminded of their painful unsolved problems."
Synopsis:
Thomas has unknowingly celebrated his dismissal with champagne with his colleagues on Friday and on Monday his boss slipped him a letter, in which he learned of it. Alice was overweight as a child and insults like "thick fat pig" or "don’t munch that much" have been etched into her heart. The ‘safe place’ for her was, when she played alone. When Gabi wanted a divorced, her mother reduced this step to a purely sexual basis. Since then, the two only had personal contact with each other for 4 times within 4 years and it seems, her mother is not interested in clarifying the situation. Although Helga partly had a beautiful childhood, as a teenager she describes her home like that, "Around me, there was just violence. Emotional violence. The insults were just like flying around." Her marriage to a physically violent man she sees as a consequence to her emotionally abusive parents. After the birth of her third child, she got a postnatal psychosis and had to be hospitalized because otherwise she would have suffocated. "I thought I had cancer, but that was that man who drove me that far," she says, to free herself of him in a 7-year-long separation trial. Werner believed that his marriage was proceeding actually normal and mostly happy, when suddenly the special police forces came in his house, because his wife had claimed he would be violent and would wait there for her with a weapon. After this event, he noticed that she for a long time already had betrayed him in economic terms. He says, "I have tumors in my feet. Health problems with the feet in alternative medicine mean, that you want to run away from something."