Trieste Film Festival 2024: Home Sweet Home | Review
Home Sweet Home by Annika Mayer delves into the invisibility of domestic violence through the poignant testimony of Rose, a survivor who breaks her silence after decades of suffering.
Annika Mayer’s directorial debut Home Sweet Home premiered at DOK Leipzig in 2023, and celebrated its Italian premiere at the 35th edition of the Trieste Film Festival.
The film tackles the invisibility of domestic violence through the couple formed by Rose and Rolf. They live in West Germany, after World War II. It’s a prosperous society, but one in which the woman is entirely dependent on her husband. Rolf is thirteen years older than Rose. They marry even before she finishes her studies. The couple has two children, Ernst and Frank. Quite quickly, a cycle of domestic violence is established. For 23 years, Rolf subjects his wife to violence, sometimes also directed at their children, with the level of violence escalating over the years. In front of the camera, Rose opens up about her loneliness during these trials. She has never been able to confide in anyone, not even her family, fearing the judgment she would face and the uncertain future she would condemn her children to by leaving Rolf, since she doesn’t work and has no qualifications.
The setup proposed by the director is very interesting. Mayer, who is Rose’s granddaughter, alternates between showing family archive footage filmed with a Super 8 camera and the face of her grandmother commenting on these images as she watches them. There is a stark contrast between the images that seem to depict a fulfilled woman within a happy family and the reality of what she was experiencing at that time, which she now recounts in front of her granddaughter’s camera. Rose even says it in the first few minutes of the film: she doesn’t recognize herself on the screen, in that smiling young woman. The family never filmed the scenes of violence that Rose endured, and everyone presented their best selves in front of the camera. They documented that time from the angle of happiness and prosperity, overlooking the darker aspects. In this sense, the film particularly resonates with our present days, where we all have myriad tools to document our lives and share them at will. Documenting is a choice to show or to hide. Home Sweet Home thus reminds us that storytelling is fundamentally biased and that behind the facade we build, we can hide the worst horrors.
The strength of the film lies in Rose’s thought process as she recalls buried and painful memories while facing her images from a bygone era. Her granddaughter provides her with a space to finally speak out about the violence she endured. Throughout the film, Rose points out to her granddaughter the signs of hidden violence beneath this facade of happiness. In a sequence of a countryside picnic, she detects in Rolf’s gaze the signals of an impending episode of violence. The image freezes. A flashback, in slow motion, is triggered, as if the director were trying to uncover, behind the friendly face, the signs of this man’s madness. Indeed, the film is paced in a way that accompanies Rose’s thought process. There’s also real work on sound effects, while remaining subtle. Particularly, an oppressive, anxiety-inducing motif is repeated several times throughout the film, reinforcing the dissonance between what is shown on screen and Rose’s account of the violence she endured.
Domestic violence is not a recent societal ill, but victims’ voices are still too unheard, too taboo. By presenting her grandmother’s testimony on screen, the director extends a hand to victims of domestic violence, encouraging them to speak up, to find a space to speak, whether with their loved ones or with professionals.
