The Afternoon Woman
Take a look in advance
Helene grows up with her older sister Martha in a village in the East German countryside. The myth of "the Afternoon Woman" is alive and well here: whoever meets the Afternoon Woman during harvest, at the hottest part of the day, must talk about himself for an hour, in order to avoid fate (message: you must rest at the hottest part of the day, otherwise you will get sunstroke).
But you can't talk about yourself until you know yourself well. Exactly that becomes...
Helene grows up with her older sister Martha in a village in the East German countryside. The myth of "the Afternoon Woman" is alive and well here: whoever meets the Afternoon Woman during harvest, at the hottest part of the day, must talk about himself for an hour, in order to avoid fate (message: you must rest at the hottest part of the day, otherwise you will get sunstroke).
But you can't talk about yourself until you know yourself well. Exactly that is made difficult for Helene from an early age. First because of her Jewish mother, who is terrorized in the anti-Semitic climate by the other villagers and suffers from mental illness. When she is admitted to a psychiatric clinic, Helene moves to Berlin with her sister Martha. Martha throws herself into nightlife and becomes an addict. Helene, who has academic ambitions, commits an abortion after becoming pregnant. Her boyfriend reacts furiously: why didn't he have a say? By necessity, she then marries a Nazi officer and denies her Jewish ancestry with forged papers. She faces impossible dilemmas. In the heat of her survival, will she be able to escape her fate?
The different stages of Helene's life were filmed differently each time. The scenes from her childhood were shot on Super 8 film format. This should show that Helene is not yet tainted by history. The more absorbed in the seclusion of her later life and marriage, the less the camera moves and the characters are literally locked into the frame.
The Afternoon Woman is the film adaptation of Julia Franck's acclaimed and award-winning book of the same title. Franck based the story on the history of her own grandmother.