With: Josje Pater, Chantal Fletcher, Monika Schäfer, Heike Behrend, Susanne Bünz, Maria Plum, Lilly Grote, Wilhelm Stegmeier, Bernd Seitz. Camera: Antje Schäfer; Assistent: Thomas Kutschker. Sound: Chris Drexler, Martin Zawadzki, Thomas Arslan, Thomas Schunke, Fenna Heinrich, Maureen Carey. Light: Stefan Schwietert. Decor: Irmela Baumert, Bernd Seitz.

„Auf gehts. Aber wohin“ is a bit of a boarding school film and a bit of a fairytale. The women who inhabit it yearn for something beyond the borders and they don’t have to venture any further in their search than where they are. It is as if the girls were protected from reality, as if they were not living close to the police and the noise of the highway. The blood does not flow from their head and even the TV is not in their room. Things are from another world or the girls are alien.

As if held by an invisible force, they are stuck in a structure. The airplane with which one wants to get away brings the other. The car which the one enters finds the other beside the highway. Everything happens as predestined. The film is quiet, despite its cinematic movement. As all stories are already told in the cinema, the details can be omitted. A force keeps everything together and does not leave them. Neither the attack nor the arrest nor the dead shock me, it is the slowness, the laziness and perseverance of longing that touches me.

The world is terribly large and terribly small at the same time – the small abandonment also means the great abandonment – and that really makes problems.

Ute Aurand