Wilma will mehr

Wilma is in her mid-forties, living in the Lausitz region of Brandenburg in the late 1990s. Within a single week she loses her job and catches her husband Alex cheating. She does not gather her strength, make a plan, or wait until spring: on impulse, she goes to Vienna. There she finds work, moves into a bohemian flatshare, and ends up teaching at a dance school with a long history behind it. The film is not about a grand comeback but about something far less cinematic: starting again at an age when one is no longer expected to.

It was written and directed by Maren-Kea Freese, and it is her third feature. The time and place are not set dressing: the late-1990s Lausitz is the region where, after reunification, mining and most of the jobs that went with it disappeared — so Wilma's private collapse coincides with the condition of a whole area. German critics singled out the fact that the film handles this without Ostalgie: it does not mourn a vanished East Germany but follows one person who has things to do.

Fritzi Haberlandt takes the lead, one of the strongest actresses in German theatre and film, and the reviews agree on this point: the film rests on her, and it holds. Thomas Gerber, Stephan Grossmann and Meret Engelhardt appear alongside her. The film won the audience award at the Neiße Filmfestival, held in the German-Polish-Czech border region — that is, in the very area whose daily life it describes.

The reception is not unanimous. Filmdienst called it realistic and funny, while another review charges it with stringing together East German clichés and says its lead actress is what saves it. Several critics also found the pace slow: the story assembles itself from episodes rather than following a conventional arc. For viewers who like films built that way, that is an advantage rather than a flaw.