12/02/2025 - After last year’s Familiar Places, the German helmer continues exploring questions of identity and origins from an intimate perspective in her upcoming feature

(© Marcus Hoehn)

Young director Mala Reinhardt is one of seven talents included in the Face to Face promotional campaign run by German Films during the Berlinale (see the news). Her first documentary, 2018’s Der zweite Anschlag, told the story of German citizens who were also migrants, and who suffered racist violence in Germany. In her second feature, Familiar Places (2024), which took part in the Critics’ Week at Locarno, she explored questions of identity and origins from an intimate perspective, and she will continue pursuing similar topics in her next project, Mother/Language.

Cineuropa: You are preparing a new film project. Can you tell us more about it?
Mala Reinhardt: Mother/Language is about the question of what it does to us if we do not learn the language of our ancestors and how this affects cultural identity. I am currently researching the Tamil community in India, but also in Malaysia. It's about the connection with the British colonial period, when millions of people were brought from India to Malaysia to work on the plantations. I'm currently in the research phase.

Do you already have an idea of how you want to approach the subject cinematically?
It's going to be a hybrid film with fictional elements because it's very much about memories, about oral history, for which there are simply no images. Certain situations will therefore have to be staged. I imagine the film to be very dreamlike and poetic.

In Familiar Places, you say at the beginning that you hadn't planned to appear in the film yourself. What was the experience like in the end?
It was a very special experience. I took on a lot of roles at the same time in Familiar Places. In addition to directing, I was in front of the camera, but I also often recorded the sound and produced the film. We had to produce the movie with almost no funding and financed it via crowdfunding. My daughter was born in the meantime, too. I had many jobs at the same time, which I don’t recommend to anyone. But it also gave me an understanding of what the other departments do. I didn't originally want to be in front of the camera, but it turned out that way in the course of filming. It felt very coherent because the movie is very much about my friendship with the protagonist. We ask ourselves similar questions in life but have different ways of answering them.

How will you introduce your perspective in the new project?
I'm not currently planning to step in front of the camera again or use a voice-over from my perspective. Mother/Language is about the collective experience. It's not specifically about India, Malaysia or Tamils, but it's an issue that affects many people around the world in different ways. I want to emphasise this collective aspect.

You filmed Familiar Places over quite a long period of time. How did you develop the concept for the film? To what extent were you able to write and plan ahead?
I made a lot of decisions together with my protagonist, Akosua: she kept making suggestions about possible situations. We discussed many aspects, and I thought about how things could be realised, visually. The film was partly created at the desk, of course, but mostly during the shoot. The direction kept changing. I also got in front of the camera myself, which I hadn't thought of beforehand. The fact that my daughter would be in the film was unplanned, too. Moreover, it was during the pandemic, so we had to adjust a lot of plans.

You say in the movie that there are no answers to certain questions. But did you still find any answers yourself?
I don't know if I've really found any answers. But I have found a bit more peace and a more relaxed attitude towards these questions. I realised that these are questions that concern a lot of people, and that people without a so-called migration background are also asking themselves questions about identity and belonging. The reactions of the audience also showed me this. Many people said that they could relate to the topic, and that gave me a sense of connection.  

Der zweite Anschlag was your first movie. It must have been a similarly intense experience to making Familiar Places. What has motivated you to continue in this profession since your first film?
I made Der zweite Anschlag together with colleagues, even before I began to study film. The film was very important to us. There is a lot of talk about racism in Germany today. But we made the movie in 2015, before George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. We didn't get any funding for it at the time, which showed us that nobody was interested in this topic. We took these individual interviews as a basis because it was extremely important to us that these people were given a voice. The intensity of these interviews triggered a sense of responsibility. So, we made the film without any money. It was one of the first movies to deal with the subject. The feedback we got and the fact that it had its premiere at DOK Leipzig showed us that it was relevant. That confirmed to me that the stories I want to tell seem to interest people. This motivates me to continue making films.

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