Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand

Under the Pavement Lies the Strand

Grischa and Heinrich are actors in West Berlin, who become a couple after spending a night together backstage. Soon, however, Heinrich's desire to have children drives a wedge between them. Grischa is involved at the margins of the women's movement and initiates a project surveying working women about their everyday life, abortion, and domestic violence. Heinrich, on the other hand, still mourns the unrealised utopia of the student movement and sinks into self-pity and lethargy. Grischa doesn't believe he could handle the responsibility of a child. But then she becomes pregnant.

In the film, made seven years after the upheaval of 1968, Helma Sanders-Brahms parses the attitudes of a generation. While a feeling of political impotence drove frustrated street protestors to withdraw or, as in Heinrich's case, to embrace a sense of hope for a "revolution a deux" in love, it motivated women to tackle Marx's "second contradiction" of women's repression. The clash between the political and the personal is also reflected in the film’s aesthetic. Intimate scenes of cosy togetherness are juxtaposed with documentary footage, for instance of a demonstration against Germany’s anti-abortion law.

Source: 69. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)