It’s a badly neglected episode in recent German history. Before the Berlin Wall came down, thousands of Mozambicans travelled to the GDR to work and study. Many started families. Both countries were socialist and they seemed like natural allies. But then, after reunification, the contract workers discovered they were no longer wanted or needed in the new Germany. Impoverished and without any chance of work, they were forced to head back to Africa, often leaving wives and children behind them. They had been very badly exploited.
Young German filmmaker Brenda Akele Jorde’s The Homes We Carry (screening in the Hot Docs/European Film Promotion Changing Face of Europe programme following its world premiere in DOK Leipzig last autumn) tells the story of one of the families split apart. Through her co-director and cinematographer David-Simon Gross, Jorde came across Sarah, an Afro-German woman cruelly separated from her Mozambican father Eulidio.
As a Black child in East Germany, Sarah faced prejudice when she was growing up. Now a mother herself, she wants her own daughter Luana to understand her African heritage. Her daughter’s father Eduardo is from Mozambique but they’re not living together.
“I was shocked and I didn’t know about it,” the director says of the plight of the workers from Mozambique. “I thought it was quite crazy that such a big amount of people [an estimated 20,000 Mozambicans between 1979 and 1989] worked in East Germany but it is kind of forgotten both in our generation and the generation above. Germany just doesn’t talk about it.”
In telling Sarah’s story, Jorde, also an Afro-German, realised she could both talk about events in the past and put a focus on racial and social injustices which persist today. “Sarah still is influenced by it. The whole family is influenced by it,” she says of the fall-out after Eulidio left Germany.
The screening at Hot Docs is timely. Last week, a collective of Afro-German filmmakers and industry professionals called out the Berlin Film Festival for its allegedly anti-Black selection policies.
“Systemic racism still exists and is still a big problem,” Jorde reflects on the controversy. “Educational opportunities are definitely not equal…of course, the people in power are mostly white. The people that have the money are mostly white. If they can’t identify with the stories, they won’t give money to Black filmmakers. Still a lot needs to change.”
Jorde is at an early stage of her career. Although she has had “good experiences” so far in getting projects commissioned, she points out she comes from a relatively privileged educational background. “I was lucky that film school puts us in contact with broadcasters,” she explains how The Homes We Carry was backed by Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg as well as by Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf.
In the documentary, the filmmakers follow Sarah as she travels with her daughter to meet her relatives in Africa and to spend time with Eulidio and Eduardo. “I think it was a very emotional journey for Sarah. Sometimes, we felt we could support her with our presence and sometimes we also had to accept that she really wanted to spend a whole day with her father without us.”
The daughter is tiny but is already facing some of the same dilemmas as her parents. She once even expressed the wish that she was “white” like her grandmother.
“It is kind of heartbreaking,” Jorde says of that remark. “The reality is Germany is still bad. You are ‘othered,’ reminded of your different skin. We put this in the film to show this was not something that happened only in Sarah’s childhood but was still present. At the same time, Sarah found herself. She probably doesn’t feel torn between two cultures any more. She knows she is a German and she has this other cultural background but she knows who she is.”
The director was determined not to take sides between any of her protagonists. “I really wanted to show a family from multiple perspectives,” she says.
It helped that her own experiences chimed with those of her subjects. “I also grew up having my [Ghanaian] father and that part of my family far away…[but] the more I worked on the film and the more I talked with Sarah, I realised I am actually quite happy about having this bi-cultural identity.”
Alongside the tensions and prejudice, there are also many positive sides to such a rich family history. “I thought, oh, I didn’t ask Sarah so much about the beautiful part of having this identity. I went back and had another interview. It is just a few sentences that made it in the film but I think they really make a difference. Of course, it is hard but it is also beautiful.”
The Homes We Carry has screened widely on the festival circuit since its DOK Leipzig premiere. The director is now raising money for Sarah’s father Eulidio, who has fallen on tough times having already been so shoddily treated as a contract worker in the GDR. Through the site, https://www.share-doc.org/d/37001, she is hoping to help him start his own business.
Jorde isn’t just a filmmaker. She has a side job teaching circus skills to kids. “I really believe in the power of circus which is not competitive…it’s all about finding your individual strength and doing something beautiful as a group,” she declares.
And, yes, the circus work helps with the documentary work: you need to be equally flexible and open-minded in both worlds. “I think the professions help each other. In circus, I learn to be present, to be spontaneous, to adapt to situations – as a documentary maker, those are skills I need when I am shooting.”
The director’s TV series Family Of Choice, about Queer Black dance culture, is due to come out in June. She is now looking to screen The Homes We Carry in Mozambique.
