6.5.14

Tourists go home! a new German doc from Berlin: WELCOME GOODBYE

Welcome Goodbye
By Nana Rebhan
Germany,
80 Min.
HD + HDV
Produktionsjahr 2014
 
 

“Welcome Goodbye” says it (most) of all from its title. ..“Thank you for coming by, but please go back home as soon as possible!”…
 This seems to be the latest trend in some of Berlin’s communities in regard to the “tourist problem”. Overwhelmed by “tourists” (foreigners all of them? Possibly many provincial Germans too?), some Berliners, many of whom coming from elsewhere, fear losing their grip on “their” city…
The city needs the tourists’ money. And, as one high administrator of the Tourist Industry in Berlin puts it, Berliners should accept, in the end (or shouldn’t they?) that they cannot live in such a lavish “kind of cake” without allowing to share slices of it with those “others”…
Is this a mere social dysfunction, starting and ending with the disatisfaction of not having enough access to the financial gains that the city is having from tourism? Is this a sort of newly refurbished fear of “die anderen”? And who is this “tourist”, this fury animal wearing so many different coats?

An arduous world traveler herself, the author (story, directing and camerawork) Nana Rebhan tours “the question”. She enquires among several social blankets, across several neighborhoods, people with very clear and efficient ideas about this “problem”.
Poets, philosophers, musicians, academics, squatters, nostalgics of the free minded Berlin of decades ago, moaners of the not so long ago best rents in Europe, self made characters, real inhabitants, friends, colleagues, neighbors, or even foreigners…Through many personal stories, some real and some fictional, we gather as many opinions and as many nuances on the same “question”…
Mrs. Rebhan films with energy and color.
She succeeds in avoiding any personal judgment, while expressing, even though as a subtext, hers and her protagonists’ pride of belonging to a Berlin spirit …
Or is it rather “spirituality”?...
 
Giulia Dobre
Radio Romania
 
www.welcomegoodbye.de
info@welcomegoodbye.de
 
VERLEIH:
 
Alfaville Berlin
Kontakt: alfaville.film@gmx.net
 
 

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