Cherry Blossoms & Demons

In my first film CHERRY BLOSSOMS - HANAMI the old parents visit their children, who all have no time for them, and Rudi Angermeier verifies this: children are so disappointing. It was the story of parents who could no longer bridge the distance to their children, no longer find their way to them before they die.
I have always wondered what children’s views of their parents are, and in this film CHERRY BLOSSOMS & DEMONS, I want to tell it. Especially from the perspective of the youngest son, Karl, who was always seen as the mummy’s boy by the siblings and who had gone all the way to Tokyo to free himself from his mother. Now his parents have been dead for ten years and Karl has returned to Munich. He drinks, lives separated from his wife and child, has lost his job and is slowly drifting downhill. He has no more strength within him; even his own life frightens him. His dead parents will not let him go, his siblings want to sell the house they all inherited but he refuses to sell it yet at the same time does not want to live in it either. The ghosts of the past are blocking him and one day, like a scene from a classic Japanese ghost film, a young woman with long, black hair appears and claims that she loves him. It is Yu, who had helped Rudi, who had been wandering aimlessly around Tokyo and deeply mourning his wife, to find Fuji. Yu now sets a story in motion that is inspired by the Orient but set in Bavaria, where not only Karl’s family members of the last few generations arrive but also Yu’s. The generation of Nazi grandparents on both sides, the silent parents, full of shame, and their children, who are so sad but cannot understand their own sadness at all. Karl struggles and fights with these very real ghosts, and entirely new aspects of Rudi’s and Trudi’s behaviour become visible. How wrong children can be in the way they think about their parents. How little they really know about them. How hard they try not to disappoint them. Even after they are gone. Why won’t Karl’s dead parents let him go? What demons pursue Karl? Yu has experience with demons and ghosts, which is because of her Japanese origins. There, they are very real and powerful, and you learn how to deal with them as a child: you invite them in for a cup of tea.
My intention is to tell a story that was inspired by the East but takes place in the West, the reversal and continuation of Cherry Blossoms, and tell it very realistically because our dead live through our memories and our demons are often very real. Only cinema can treat this phenomenon nonchalantly and realistically. Only there can parents Rudi and Trudi really appear as if they were not dead. Only there can fantastic demons appear who are reminiscent of Perchten, both Bavarian and Japanese ones. The intermixture of elements should be similar to that in CHERRY BLOSSOMS – HANAMI in terms of style, moving, almost documentary, light and with great poetry. I would like to use close proximity to explore the inner truth of the characters, of
6
both the children and the parents, their very own, unique inner beauty and ugliness, their contradictions, which make them human and which are the engine of the story - right through to the question of how one actually knows if one is dead or alive. This gives the story something shimmering, something abysmal and touches on very deep emotions that we are all aware of, fear of not doing justice to our real identity, of not really having found ourselves, or not really being alive. But at the same time, as in all of my films, there is still no lack of comedy for all that, and Karl’s radical transformation has absurd and comical traits, just as everyone’s struggles for truth do. So this is a deeply sad comedy - just like life.