Luise Donschen's Entire Days Together is exclusively showing November 4 - December 3, 2020 in MUBI's Brief Encounters series
Above: Hauptarchiv der v. Bodelschwinghschen Stiftungen Bethel.
In the beginning was the place: the special school. My first day there made me weak in a way I hadn’t experienced in quite a while. Apparently there were feelings everywhere: happiness, anger, sadness, loneliness, despair, affection. I was strongly affected by what I saw and what I heard. Afterwards my memories of what I experienced were sharply separated into pictures and sounds. Maybe that was my way of dealing with the intensity of emotions. The weakness I felt at the first encounter became my indicator for every decision in the production process of Entire Days Together. I wanted to keep it and I wanted to work with the non-professional actors along the line of my stimulation of this weakness through them. I found it in their gestures, their eyes, their sounds, their poses.