Wood and Water

Anke is disappointed. After her last day of work in a parish office in the Black Forest, she was looking forward to a summer holiday together with her children on the Baltic coast, a place where they lived as a young family and where Anke spent her best years. But her son Max, who lives in Hong Kong, cancels at short notice because the pro-democracy protests in the city have brought life there to a standstill. In the emptiness of her retirement, alone between four walls, Anke decides to fly to Hong Kong to see her son. While Max is away on a business trip, she takes up residence in his flat and cautiously begins to navigate this mysterious new world. Conversations with strangers gradually allow Anke to get her bearings. She meets a young woman who is sad because she has to leave Hong Kong, accompanies the concierge of Max’s apartment block to lunch and to Tai Chi, and also meets a psychiatrist, a fortune teller and a social activist. These encounters and her experience of the city help her to break down the inner walls she constructed years ago and make way for a new chapter in her life.  

Source: 71. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)