Until the moon is born in the west

This is not a new story. It is a story that repeats itself every day, every hour, every minute: a person leaves his bombed-out homeland and risks his life on the way across the Mediterranean to the West, driven by the mere hope of a future. Every day, people set out on this journey. For some the beginning, for others the end without return. And that is precisely why it is important not only to tell their story again and again, but to tell it anew.
With "Until the moon is born in the west" I want to find a way to retell the story of a refugee, her path to Germany, from a fresh perspective, in a different language: as a dance film.

The idea didn't come from anywhere. In the past two years, as part of documentary film projects, I met and spoke with many people who came to Berlin in recent years for very different yet similar reasons. Their stories and their strength have touched me deeply, and made me realise how little I, as an educated middle-class German, really understand and, above all, feel, despite (or because of) the inflationary reporting on migration.
I asked myself, how can one make it tangible to people like me what the millions of people who flee are going through?
Words often fail. That's why I wanted to find a language that works without letters: dance.

For many it may seem unusual to make such a story tangible with and
and through dance. For me, however, it is
the most obvious thing of all. A dancer myself, I learned my cinematic craft self-taught by filming dance videos.

Here I feel like a fish in water. As a filmmaker, I am interested in the body in all its forms and non-forms, and in the movement that creates meaning in the visual.

I am aware that I am telling a story here that is not my story. Therefore, I would like to develop the short film together with choreographers and dancers of different origins who have experienced war, flight and/or arrival in a foreign country.
I want to let them tell their journey from their own perspective, give an inside view.

Above all, I am interested in feelings; in making the experience of war, flight and arrival in a foreign country tangible for the viewer. In doing so, I don't want to limit myself to one country, but rather create a multi-place that stands as an example for all the countries where war is raging - in every form.
The script serves merely as a roadmap, on the basis of which something sincere can grow in collaboration with the dancers and the choreographers Raphael Moussa Hillebrand and Medhat Aldaabal.
Because this is their story. But not only. It is the story of our time.

The dance film is divided into three acts:
| attack, || awekening, || arrival.

The departure or escape, the heart of the short film, is filmed underwater to make the unyieldingness and threat to life of the sea omnipresent. The dancers move in a state between life and loss of the same, but only one will make it.

Stylistically, "Until the moon is born in the west" pairs dance with moving image and sound:

Dance: In a mixture of choreography and improvisation, I would like to explore the following questions: What does the body experience in war? What moves it to set out? What feelings accompany it on the run? How does it react and change between the poles of rapprochement and alienation?
Can a person overcome the history of his body?

Image: Dance movements are taken up with a dynamic camera and thus enriched and expanded. Close-ups are played with, directing the viewer's focus and creating a claustrophobic closeness to the protagonists and their emotions, but also long shots that give the viewer free rein to see and interpret. Sandy tones dominate together with the colour blue of the sea and red of the blood of irreparable wounds.
The tone is sombre and surreal, but hopeful.

Sound: The images are accompanied by experimental sound, which plays with sounds of war, escape (such as the pattering of feet, the roar of waves and screaming silence) and arrival in a big city. And music is created from these sounds. This sound is paired with musical surfaces.

"Until the moon is born in the west" is less a realistic picture of our society than a poetic film that follows the logic of a dream.